Mobility as a Service: Early Implementations in the UK

Mobility as a Service, MaaS, has been developing at a pace across Europe. While engaged in an InnovateUK project, MotionHub, to implement a MaaS scheme in a municipality in the South East England, the authors began to ask two fundamental questions; what is MaaS and to what extent is it materialising in the UK. From the experience of MotionHub, it is clear that UK implementations would be slow.
Combining a number of web-based services and amalgamating their financial transactions is relatively straightforward. However, introducing the potential for public transport ticketing as well raises additional security, scale and financial constraints. Motion Hub has engaged with major players and regulators across the public transport industry. In its latter stages project was rolled out to the public. The various individual services became available from the single website via one membership application and the use of a single card.
Other MaaS styled initiatives have been reviewed and it appears that there are just five other MaaS projects being trialled concurrently with MotionHub that provide journey planning and single point ticket purchase for multimodal journeys. A number of other initiatives provide just some aspects of MaaS.
The project has also reviewed customer perceptions, suitability of various types of town to MaaS initiatives and the varying enthusiasm amongst local government officials. From these reviews it is clear that the MaaS uptake will be slow.
However, reflecting on the theoretical discussions about Maas, there appears to be a significant gap between theory and practice In particular of the claimed benefits of de-congestion and reduced pollution seem to be some way off in the future. This is not a criticism of MotionHub and the other implementations, some of which are substantial investments. It is acknowledgement that the goal of seamless adaptive travel is an extremely ambitious one.