Maasive distraction
When my wife and I first decided to buy a house when we were in our 20s, we started looking in Queen’s Park. We loved the area with its lovely park and cosy shops.
Unfortunately, we soon realised we couldn’t remotely afford to live there. So we started looking around the next stop out of town: Kensal Green. Which was also lovely. But we couldn’t afford there either. So we shifted another stop along the Bakerloo line to Willesden Junction. We couldn’t afford anything in the ‘nice’ bit, but we eventually found a tiny house in the Park Royal industrial estate; sandwiched between a coach depot, a builders’ merchant and a pub.
With great excitement, we got my mum to come and look at our dream house.
Unfortunately, instead of being thrilled for us, she said we were mad and pointed out that the house didn’t have a single thing we’d originally said we were looking for (other, of course, than being a house). Feeling rather foolish, we pulled out.
Something similar has happened with Mobility-as-a-Service.
MaaS is no longer as exciting as we think it is
The original idea of an all-you-can-eat subscription providing unlimited mobility is every bit as transformational as the hype suggests. If it ever happened, it would truly take the fight to the private car. Unfortunately, for the reasons described a few weeks ago, it never will.
So what’s then happened is the proponents of MaaS have gradually changed the definition but never once compromised on the hype.
Which is how we’ve ended up where we are, with “Mobility as a Service” (MaaS) seen as the holy grail that, once found, will unlock modal shift hitherto unimagined - despite the definition now being distinctly underwhelming.
In effect, the transport industry is still fantasising about the four-bedroom house in Queen’s Park; but it’s putting in an offer on a tiny cottage by a builders’ merchant.
We saw a great illustration of this recently. A headline in Smart Transportation magazine said that the latest R:GA mobility report found that:
Two-thirds (66%) of private vehicle owners and eight in ten (82%) people leasing are willing to give up their vehicles in favour of mobility as a service (MaaS), over the next 10 years.
Wow! That’s stunning! I mean 66% of people would be willing to quit their owned cars for MaaS. So let’s take a look at the report and see what, precisely, their definition of MaaS is:
A set of services which provide access to transportation in response to customers’ evolving mobility needs. Often integrating trip planning, payment applications, and multiple forms of transportation such as cars, bikes, and scooters, all within a single platform.
OK, so I think that’s an app that plans and pays for rail journeys. Cool! So 66% of people would quit their cars if we give them an integrated app. Wow! Go, go, go!
Except that when you look at the actual question that was asked, it was this:
How likely would you be to rely on mobility services like ride-hailing, car sharing, and scooter or bike rentals enough to consider giving up owning or leasing your own car in the next 10 years?
So, the question asked nothing about booking or payment platforms. It asked how likely people would be to “consider” giving up owning their cars and listed a basket of mobility services they could rely on instead. It was the availability of the alternatives that was the motivator, not the single booking platform.
(Oh, and the figure isn’t 66%, it is 50%).
But the MaaS hype continues.
In last year’s final edition of Passenger Transport Jonathan Bray of the Urban Transport Group said:
“Perhaps the ultimate endgame which would play to public transport’s advantage would be a MaaS payment platform which would combine payment and information options for road use, public transport, car hire, taxis, new mobility options and active travel.”
I entirely agree with Jonathan Bray that a single app for payment and information would be easier for customers than multiple apps. And I think it would be good if it happened. Fingers crossed it will.
But I worry that turning this into the “ultimate endgame” risks creating a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
The Government has been a huge cheerleader for MaaS but its own user research is somewhat tepid. If you get 10 mins to spare, click through this report.
It was commissioned by Government to understand users’ attitudes towards MaaS. The whole report screams of a solution looking for a problem.
This quote typifies the whole thing:
“Whilst participants felt that a MaaS platform could provide information regarding delays and alternative transport routes, they were keen to note that this would not overcome existing infrastructure issues. These included frustrations related to a perceived lack of service provision with comments around infrequent services, lack of services during the evening in more rural areas, limited reach of public transport (for those who worked in locations not served by public transport), and lack of dedicated cycle lanes.”
Overall, the conclusion was “I’ll use it if it makes it cheaper”. Which is fine, except that (as we discussed previously) it probably won’t. Nothing in the report suggests that we’ve found the key that unlocks the future of modal shift on a mass (maas?) scale.
A solution looking for a problem
So, what is the problem to which MaaS (as now defined) is a solution? It’s a question that even the people with a lot at stake struggle to answer. This blog post by the CEO of a leading MaaS platform takes 1,698 words to attempt to define the problem statement. Eventually, he settles on:
Usability of public transport in the city and mobility service level at rural areas.
So MaaS is designed to solve the following problems:
Public transport in cities is not useable
Mobility service levels in rural areas is poor
This is Pekka Möttö’s definition, but it’s pretty consistent with others.
So the question then becomes, is integrating all existing mobility options into a single app going to solve these problems?
To discover this, we need to understand what people find unusable about public transport in cities today and why mobility service levels are poor in rural areas.
So, let’s start with usability in cities. This McKinsey report looks at public transport users in global cities. It finds that (after safety), users most value efficiency and affordability. Efficiency, in this report’s definition, is “how quickly and reliably a trip can be done by either public or private transport”. Electronic services, the category that MaaS would fall into was users’ 10th top priority. So, no, electronic services aren’t the biggest problem and solving them isn’t the answer to usabilty.
If journey times and price are the two things that users most care about, then the priority must be solutions that deliver these. This isn’t the article to discuss them, but (fairly obviously) this must mean prioritising buses through congestion and introducing new services. On cost, it must mean attracting new users so that the operating costs are split across more customers, increasing efficiency and attracting more third-party funding.
I can’t think of a single industry where joining everything into one app has been necessary or helpful.
The reality is that if your local bus route had an app as easy and intuitive as Uber’s, you’d be cool with jumping between apps. We do it all the time in other situations. Indeed, the rankings for the most popular apps show that of the top 10 apps, 7 are owned by either Facebook or Google; who have kept them as separate apps even under common ownership.
These tech giants prefer to keep different services separate for the sake of user simplicity and their own flexibility. And yet in public transport, we want to reverse this. They have one company with multiple apps. We want multiple companies with one app. I cannot see it working.
So why do I care about all this?
Well, because I worry that obsessing with MaaS risks being a distraction. Why?
Everyone’s waiting for everyone else
By definition, MaaS is multi-modal. Is it to be ‘done’ by tech platforms such as Citymapper? Or is it to be ‘done’ by public bodies like TfL? Is it a hybrid of the two, as in the West Midlands with Whim? Or is it a landgrab by one provider over the others, as with Uber’s integration of other modes?
In the absence of clarity, there’s an incentive for everyone to assume that someone else will do it, and to kick the can down the road. But while a single app isn’t the transformational solution that its cheerleaders argue, the focus on MaaS is bed-blocking sensible investments in improved information and payment services. It’s tempting to think that if MaaS is going to come and rescue us, I don’t need to worry too much about a new app. Indeed, individual service providers or companies may even feel that a big investment would be irresponsible while so many questions remain unanswered.
To illustrate, let’s look at one firm that didn’t wait for MaaS but got on with doing their own thing in their own app without any attempt at integration.
Addictively easy - and standalone
Uber is popular because its app is really simple and easy to use.
As a challenge, right now, open the Uber app (which I bet you already have on your phone) and the First bus app (which I bet you haven’t) and ‘order’ travel (by which I mean choose a ride and pay for it). For me, the Uber experience involved three touches of the screen (excluding typing the destination). The First experience involved 11. (This is not a particular criticism of First - most of the big transport groups are similar)
Yes, Uber are now integrating other modes, but that’s not how they grew.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the promoters of MaaS are pushing it so hard because they’ve given up hope of the big groups investing in digital and feel that outside intervention might be the best solution. This would be analogous to the fact it took the intervention of the public sector to force the big bus companies to solve on-bus payments with contactless and to publish fares data. However, if the big groups are delaying investment until the ecosystem is clarified, then what’s actually happened is a catch-22.
2. It’s really hard
DfT describes MaaS as being :
“The integration of various modes of transport along with information and payment functions into a single mobility service.”
This is a difficult and complex thing to do. Indeed, virtually no-one has yet made it work at scale and with adoption.
Solutions like Citymapper are already in the market for the information part but does it need bundling of payments?. There is virtually no successful industry that I can think of (reader challenge: can you think of one?) where the solution to customer problems was for all the players in the industry to integrate into one monolith app with a single industry-wide pricing structure. That’s a recipe for sloth, everyone spending their time in meetings designing clearing houses and inflexible solutions that don’t work for customers.
I have spent time in the rail industry, where the central clearing house of Rail Settlement Plan (the system through which all fares revenue is attributed) is a major constraint on train operators’ ability to innovate. Airlines are hugely limited in what they can do as a result of building themselves a house of cards of legacy integrations over five decades. And they certainly haven’t attempted to create a single app for everything.
Overall, despite the sloth, I think the airlines have more-or-less got it right. The data is out there, anyone can book anything and a market for retail has developed. But don’t let anyone tell you it’s been pain-free. Nor has it been the saviour of the industry: the fastest growing airline in European history is Ryanair, and they didn’t participate until 2014.
The user research makes the blood run cold. In just the focus groups run by this research agency, participants said that MaaS should be integrated with the London Taxicard, national railcards, Club 50, Freedom Pass and Metrolink season tickets. Help!
Let’s calm down. Integrated planning and payments is a good thing, so let’s build incremental integration projects adding more to what we have, including open data and APIs.
Great quality payments and apps are essential, so let’s not incentivise anyone to slow down in delivering the best possible experience to their customers.
And, above all, let’s focus on the big things that will make a difference: faster journey times, better quality, lower prices.
MaaS as originally envisaged (unlimited subscription bundles) is amazing and would have been transformational. But it’s not happening; MaaS as currently envisaged is fine but not worth distracting us from higher priorities.
So here’s my plea: everyone in the world of transport and mobility should simply ask themselves if their customer experience is already utterly frictionless. If not, don’t wait for the MaaS fairies. Just fix it.
