Governance Participation Strategies for Mobility as a Service

New and smart mobility are transforming the transportation landscape globally. As the landscape evolves, it will become increasingly viable for travellers to meet their mobility needs by purchasing rides or seats instead of vehicles or other transportation assets.

Mobility as a Service (MaaS) is an emerging framework that unites public and private transportation services through a digital medium (app or platform) to enable multimodal trip planning, integrated payment, and price bundling and incentives. While countless benefits and opportunities come
with the promise of MaaS, there are areas where the concept could fall short: a lack of government intervention, for example, could result in proprietary walled gardens where private operators offer their services without complete multimodal offerings across a region. It will be critical to provide a wide range of mobility services within one or more comprehensive MaaS platforms to achieve efficient, customer-friendly MaaS options. Currently, governance in MaaS is relatively limited in Canada, with only a few transportation agencies studying how to participate in the field.

In Metro Vancouver the ride-purchasing market is already well established, with many people choosing shared transportation (public transit, car-share, vehicle-for-hire, bikeshare) instead of owning a personal vehicle. To prepare for further transformation in the transportation landscape, TransLink retained WSP to develop a discussion paper to help the agency define its role in MaaS. The paper identifies and assesses approaches TransLink could take to transport system management (i.e., regulatory oversight of private-sector industry participants); with regards to the provision of customerfacing MaaS services; and with respect to perceived risks of under- and over-involvement in MaaS. The goal of this paper was to identify possibilities for TransLink to participate in MaaS, as well as preparing the agency for future mobility disruptions. The paper was developed through a desktop review of current MaaS examples, and interviews and workshops with TransLink executives to align the paper with the agency’s priorities. WSP’s global thought leadership and experience with MaaS was leveraged by engaging our MaaS leaders in Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia to share how MaaS is being deployed elsewhere in the world.