Traffic management: The invisible actor in the MaaS value chain

Some critical factors that have resulted from the recent growth of cities, greatly affect daily urban mobility: the car density with respect to the surface of the city; the structure of the urban areas that prevents radical viability transformation; the tourism flow (although usually concentrated in specific periods of the year); increased needs to move and increased transportation offer, the inefficient use of the vehicles, and the daily people flows from the suburbs to downtown and vice versa, are such factors that contribute to the rise of environmental, mobility and social costs which are becoming difficult to sustain for today’s cities. Cities, in their attempt to address these issues, are beginning to outline clear targets across the three pillars of sustainability: environment, quality of life and social welfare. Within this context, a new concept as Mobility as a Service (MaaS) can be defined as the integration of various forms of transport services into a single mobility service accessible on demand. For the user, MaaS offers added value through a single point of contact to provide access to mobility, with a sole payment channel instead of multiple ticketing and payment operations. MaaS aims at providing an alternative to dependency on car ownership that may be seen as convenient, flexible, reliable and cheaper. For the implementation of MaaS the availability of dynamic, high-quality data is a mandatory need, and vice-versa, similarly interesting it is to study how the data gathered by MaaS operators could be used to enrich and qualify the other data sets of transport systems. The data gathered by MaaS services are often location- and time-specific and provides also information about user behaviour and preferences. This data, when anonymised, would become an invaluable asset when combined with conventional data sets and sources used for traffic management, and transport and urban planning purposes. ...