When we launched Jelbi in Berlin last year we were faced with a challenge to handle radically different mobility services within a single European city. Now we can say with certainty that it was a huge achievement not only for all of us at Trafi but for the mobility industry as a whole. Nevertheless, the only way for us to top it was to take on an even more complex, multi-city mobility network and make it even better. This week we are presenting you with yumuv – world’s first regional Mobility as a Service with subscriptions. Owned by Swiss Federal Railways (SBB CFF FFS), public transport operators (PTOs) in Zurich (VBZ), Basel (BVB), and Bern (BERNMOBIL), and powered by Trafi.
Of all countries embracing public transportation as the backbone of urban mobility, Switzerland stands second to none. From their synchronized scheduling of all forms of public transportation to their unified ticketing system, this mountain nation is an example where even the most affluent people rely on public transportation every single day. Thus, when we took the task of launching yumuv, we didn’t flinch in basing the whole product experience in public transportation. It only makes sense when you have such a firm ground to stand on.
However, using public transportation to move between Zurich, Basel, and Bern is not the same as relying on shared mobility inside the cities. Our lives are too chaotic to expect public transportation to cover all our use cases. Nevertheless, instead of falling back to owning private cars, the younger generation is getting their driver’s licenses later, if at all. According to one study done in Geneva, the home to the world-famous auto show, driver’s licenses issued to people under 25 years went from 75% 18 years ago to 65% in 2017. It shows a trend that younger Swiss citizens want to incorporate shared mobility services into their daily lives. For us, this was a clear confirmation that we had to completely integrate well-known micromobility brands like Tier, Voi, and BOND into a single, holistic multimodal service.
So, the takeaway here: no single provider, operator, or solution could have made all of this happen. Moreover, it would be impossible to have a successful Mobility as a Service without taking the already excellent public transportation backbone and enhancing it with trusted mobility service providers (MSPs). And for a project like yumuv to work at all, you have to have a single joint regional entity to orchestrate Mobility as a Service for and between three Swiss cities.
A multi-city approach
For a country the size of Switzerland, where you usually commute to work, school or university from another city or village, can reach your downtown in mere minutes and have immediate access to the Alps, we chose a different focal point: a completely regional, multi-city experience is more important than integrating complete intracity mobility of just one city.
Micromobility supplements public transportation
We still hear hypotheticals how micromobility should complement public transportation. Meanwhile, yumuv is pushing the envelope from day one and connects these modes seamlessly: there can be no first and last-mile solutions, if electric bikes and kick scooters are not readily available in the same place you plan your public transportation trips, and vice versa.
Mobility subscriptions
Most Swiss citizens have public transportation passes, and this suggested that extending them with mobility subscriptions for micromobility was the natural way to go. With yumuv, people can pay a flat rate for rides with electric bikes and kick scooters. This mechanism ensures that they can have a cheaper and smoother exploration of new mobility options.
Taking data privacy seriously
With yumuv, we also follow our own principle of personal data privacy being a human right. There is no better way to deliver on this deeply held conviction than to create a product that is fully functional even if travelers don’t want to share their location data either with our platform, or our partners. Certain features become less helpful but people can still effortlessly look for options that make the most sense for their situation.
Customizable off-the-shelf solution
Finally, for us at Trafi it’s very special that yumuv is sharing the same robust technology we use to power Jelbi and our other MaaS cities. Of course, we had to adjust and customize for Swiss regional specifics. However, our core functionality remains intact and is shared across other Mobility as a Service solutions, allowing for easier rollouts of upcoming features.
In other words, with yumuv, Mobility as a Service is entering its Act II. The launch of a completely integrated holistic multimodal service for a single city was exciting, but it was only the setup. Now, focusing on a multi-city regional approach and creating a single payment option like subscriptions opens new, yet to-be-explored avenues.
Founded in Vilnius, Lithuania, Trafi has been revolutionizing urban mobility since 2013. Our MaaS platform is designed to run even the most complex transport systems and has been trusted by Berlin (BVG), Brussels (STIB), Portsmouth & Southampton (Solent Transport), Munich (MVG), and Zurich (SBB).
Trafi’s mission is to empower cities with state-of-the-art MaaS solution that helps to tackle their mobility challenges and to achieve ambitious sustainability objectives. Our white-label product offers all the features and components needed to launch your own-branded MaaS service. With more than 50 existing deep integrations to mobility service providers and payment facilitators, we help to reduce risk, cost, and time-to-launch for new services.
Imagine that instead of owning the key that unlocks your personal car, you are handed a personal key to any given vehicle. This is where the promise of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) lies — a seamless access point to the complete mobility spectrum.
MaaS is not just a novel and convenient way for travelers to move within and beyond cities. It’s also the most promising alternative to the private cars which cities seek to push out.
The concept of MaaS also carries a lot of misconceptions. In this white paper, we aim to dispel the fog with what we call the Mobility as a Service fundamentals that are the key to unjamming urban mobility.
Founded in Vilnius, Lithuania, Trafi has been revolutionizing urban mobility since 2013. Our MaaS platform is designed to run even the most complex transport systems and has been trusted by Berlin (BVG), Brussels (STIB), Portsmouth & Southampton (Solent Transport), Munich (MVG), and Zurich (SBB).
Trafi’s mission is to empower cities with state-of-the-art MaaS solution that helps to tackle their mobility challenges and to achieve ambitious sustainability objectives. Our white-label product offers all the features and components needed to launch your own-branded MaaS service. With more than 50 existing deep integrations to mobility service providers and payment facilitators, we help to reduce risk, cost, and time-to-launch for new services.
It should be obvious that a true Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) solution is much more than just a mobility application for consumers. MaaS rises as a response to the current state of urban mobility, it is and has to be organized around public transport, and requires to assign the role of network orchestration to a public transport authority (PTA). In other words, PTA moves away from Public Transport and becomes the urban Mobility Authority.
PTA will have three responsibilities:
We believe that MaaS will start showing its real impact — private car rides will be replaced with sustainable and active mobility options — if its fundamental requirements and the reinvented role of the PTA will be adopted by the whole industry:
All of this suggests that the next item on the MaaS roadmap is the discovery of a new legal framework that would allow standardizing all of these business requirements and technical implementation. Especially, so that every MSP would not have to over-customize their services to each city. This, in turn, would allow us to move towards a situation where any mobility option could be opened with the same master key.
Next, we get back to the crux of it all — urban residents who just want to move in their cities as seamlessly and effortlessly as possible. Today, this creates mass inefficiencies, as everyone is looking for a convenient option that suits them the best. This is only amplified with products that are user-centric and don’t take into account the needs of the whole network.
For MaaS to work, we need to focus on how to help city residents adopt MaaS applications:
Currently, most of PTA or public transport operator (PTO) owned applications are designed only for a single mode, primarily fixed transport. We as city residents benefit from mostly exclusive offerings. So, cities have their mobility products, but their product design is not ready to support the multiplicity of mobility modes and providers that MaaS promises to deliver:
There already are off-the-shelf ready products that can support public authorities in launching these MaaS solutions in cities as fast as possible. More than that, these solutions are being constantly tested and continuously improved in different geographies with different use cases. Choosing a battle-tested product guarantees quicker user adoption and less maintenance than a custom solution.
The real challenge here, and the next item on the roadmap, is educating residents to switch over to MaaS rather than to stick to unimodal private mobility. What should follow, then, are measures that significantly affect car-based travel negatively, and an extensive campaign spreading the message that moving with sustainable, affordable, and safe means is more sensible and cool than sticking to current private options.
Finally, if we have the buy-in from the mobility industry, and if city residents are already adopting MaaS, then we can have a complete picture of how the urban population moves. Not just for the sake of enjoying data visualizations, rather than to achieve something counterintuitive: how to make sure that people would be able to rely on mobility less and less, and can reach their destinations in a hyper-proximate walking distance.
With a non-pervasive and holistic understanding of where people travel and why, city authorities would finally have all the tools to design cities in such a way that public services would be accessed either from home or nearby, and businesses would be incentivized to spread out evenly in all urban areas, not just in high density and high access urban centers. Thus, we as urban residents would gain access to where we need to go without even ever needing a car.
It’s a wonderful picture. But it can start only by us all agreeing on the actual problems and choosing the right solutions.
Founded in Vilnius, Lithuania, Trafi has been revolutionizing urban mobility since 2013. Our MaaS platform is designed to run even the most complex transport systems and has been trusted by Berlin (BVG), Brussels (STIB), Portsmouth & Southampton (Solent Transport), Munich (MVG), and Zurich (SBB).
Trafi’s mission is to empower cities with state-of-the-art MaaS solution that helps to tackle their mobility challenges and to achieve ambitious sustainability objectives. Our white-label product offers all the features and components needed to launch your own-branded MaaS service. With more than 50 existing deep integrations to mobility service providers and payment facilitators, we help to reduce risk, cost, and time-to-launch for new services.
If we follow Mobility as a Service fundamentals, it becomes self-evident that MaaS cannot be reduced to just one provider or just one app:
Once you integrate the complete mobility supply into a single application, you are confronted with a significant usability challenge — how to present the supply in a comprehensive and comprehensible way? A true MaaS solution must remove friction in how people travel around the city and allow them to easily book & pay for the services in one environment with a single master account. This is where a significant distinction between user-centric and citizen-centric design immediately arises:
In short, any MaaS application has to be a daily travel assistant that takes the very best from user-centricity and bases itself on what addresses actual city challenges. At the end of the day, any MaaS application has to (a) become a reliable alternative to a personal car, and (b) promote more sustainable mobility.
It is important to remember that cities are already orchestrating their mobility networks by:
As recent research by the German Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure suggests, to be actually sustainable, mobility providers need to link up their supply to supplement public transport rather than to compete with it. Thus, cities must take the reins they already have and start regulating, monitoring, and enforcing expected movement patterns in real-time with a dedicated policy management application that:
MaaS policy management, then, acts in tandem with any MaaS application: the latter taking the role of a receptacle for understanding how to move in a complex mobility network, while the former functioning as a delivery device to inform and nudge for the desired behavior.
Simply put, if we are focusing on car owners from underserved areas, they would be able to make a reasonable decision to leave their car in a park & ride lot and switch to public transport if a) they will know that they can do it, b) can do it seamlessly, and c) understand how much more convenient and cheaper it would be.
This might sound like a trivial and sound business practice, but each mobility provider has to be able to understand how to optimize their supply. Today, however, every provider is pursuing optimization by taking into account primarily only their fleets. Naturally, this leads to mass inefficiencies — overloaded and competing mobility supply in urban centers, while city outskirts lay mobility-bare.
In order to address inefficiencies in supply distribution, a systematically functioning MaaS requires an anonymized mobility data exchange for all mobility providers — only then can we expect providers to stop operating in twilight conditions, and cities start making evidence-driven policy-making decisions. It’s an idea that apparently is etched into the new European data strategy. This suggests that all mobility providers will have to accept standardized and secure integrations to plug into city-led MaaS solutions.
Given the sensitive nature of movement data collected from the whole mobility network, public transport authorities would have to retain strict control of who should access that data. This, in turn, means that every single mobility provider would need to pass quality thresholds and gain licenses to operate in cities. However, it should also suggest that taking a completely open, agnostic MaaS approach wouldn’t allow public transport authorities to have all the tools required to solve the challenges that their city has.
Founded in Vilnius, Lithuania, Trafi has been revolutionizing urban mobility since 2013. Our MaaS platform is designed to run even the most complex transport systems and has been trusted by Berlin (BVG), Brussels (STIB), Portsmouth & Southampton (Solent Transport), Munich (MVG), and Zurich (SBB).
Trafi’s mission is to empower cities with state-of-the-art MaaS solution that helps to tackle their mobility challenges and to achieve ambitious sustainability objectives. Our white-label product offers all the features and components needed to launch your own-branded MaaS service. With more than 50 existing deep integrations to mobility service providers and payment facilitators, we help to reduce risk, cost, and time-to-launch for new services.
In an ideal world, we should be able to teleport ourselves to our destinations. As that is still out of our reach for the foreseeable future, we have to rely on the next best thing — transportation. It either brings us what we need or gets us to where we need to go. In this episode, we will stress our ideal scenario and measure other mobility options against it.
Public transport seems to bring obstacles to the convenience and comfort of us just appearing where we need to be: we need to wait for it, share it, sometimes transfer and walk to and from it. Hence, it is only natural that people striving for absolute convenience would rather rely on affordable demand responsive services. This, in turn should guarantee that one would be driven directly from their origin to destination. However, your destination doesn’t completely match the destinations of other people that you share your morning commute with, thus it would also require to significantly reduce the vehicle sizes. Just try to imagine this swarm of small pods riding around the city, carrying everyone where they actually need to go. As prominent public transport expert Jarrett Walker has been arguing for years now, “where will they all fit in the urban street? … And when they take over, what room will be left for wider sidewalks, bike lanes, pocket parks, or indeed anything but a vast river of vehicles?”
It should be quite clear to us all that, given the challenges we have discussed before, MaaS has to depend primarily on mass public transport. It is precisely because it requires us to walk and share our rides, that it ensures the most effective, affordable, and sustainable option a mobility network can offer. More so: every MaaS solution should, first, take into account the existing physical infrastructure of public transport, create its digital twin, and, finally, enable city residents to navigate all public transport options with ease and reliability. By providing real-time arrivals, departures, disruptions, and pricing MaaS has to allow people to combine their rides between stops into full trip experiences by themselves or with trip planners. In conclusion, MaaS must entail nearly perfect public transport data and ticketing — allowing residents to plan and execute their trips without any friction.
Imagine trying to leave a low access area in the city outskirts where running a typical bus line is just too expensive. The most reasonable alternative here would actually be a demand responsive shuttle service that should serve the underserved community needs and guarantee high connectivity, affordability, and equitable access. Similarly, in cases where public transport just would not make sense, additional mobility supply should act as a supplement to it, rather than competing with it. This is especially true with micro-mobility in high density and high access areas in city centers: launching public transport for short trips there would not generate enough traffic, thus electrical or classic bikes, kick scooters, and mopeds constitute the most logical option to get around.
Moreover, all of these mobility options must be able to communicate with each other and with the public transport system, i.e. exchange their positions, capacity, and occupancy, to allow network orchestrators to optimize the supply in real-time. This, together with public transport as a backbone, would guarantee that we always have a sufficient supply that allows us to book and ride any mobility option. However, to solve the aforementioned challenges, there is a significant missing component, one that would not allow such service to be agnostic to our transport choices.
To build a truly equitable and safe mobility network, we need an entity to orchestrate it: one that by nature would not have profit as its main incentive, but rather fair and affordable access to the whole mobility network as the main goal. This would entail:
On a positive note, such orchestrating entities already exist — they are primarily known as public transport authorities. They have already acquired and retained a huge customer base, have planning skills and operational power, and, most importantly, a mandate to provide transport services for everyone at as fair of a price (if any) as possible. MaaS would, however, require for their mandates to be expanded and for them to start handling the whole mobility spectrum rather than just their public transit network. Some have already done that successfully already: while private mobility companies or actors trying to launch MaaS are struggling to cooperate and integrate other mobility providers to ensure a holistic mobility experience to their customers, public transport authorities like Berlin’s BVG or Munich’s MVG are naturally attracting all mobility network companies to integrate in public MaaS solutions, thus bringing value to city residents as fast as possible.
To be perfectly blunt: If public transport authorities are the only entities who actually manage to attract and convince mobility providers to hyper-connect into the mobility network that is, first of all, based on public transport, then one could argue that neither private nor hybrid MaaS models can guarantee what MaaS strives to guarantee — to be a legitimate alternative to privately owned cars. In other words, true MaaS seems to be public MaaS.
Founded in Vilnius, Lithuania, Trafi has been revolutionizing urban mobility since 2013. Our MaaS platform is designed to run even the most complex transport systems and has been trusted by Berlin (BVG), Brussels (STIB), Portsmouth & Southampton (Solent Transport), Munich (MVG), and Zurich (SBB).
Trafi’s mission is to empower cities with state-of-the-art MaaS solution that helps to tackle their mobility challenges and to achieve ambitious sustainability objectives. Our white-label product offers all the features and components needed to launch your own-branded MaaS service. With more than 50 existing deep integrations to mobility service providers and payment facilitators, we help to reduce risk, cost, and time-to-launch for new services.
The car is still considered to be the most flexible option to get around seamlessly — it promises you empowerment to ride anywhere at any moment. But what if you try remembering the last time you were scouting for a parking spot? In those moments, car ownership can be compared to dragging around a rock shackled to your leg. This is precisely the reason why, in 2001, Bernd Meurer coined the notion of Mobility-as-a-Service, arguing that “ownership and use do not necessarily have to be one and the same”*.
Thus, even though this argument for flexibility is usually implicitly directed against public transport, as much as for owning a personal car (most recent example — Ford’s ad for their new SUV), we cannot forget that public transport carries a significant volume of people every single day. For this reason, we decided to spend a lot of time learning as much as we could from public transport authorities (PTAs). And it seems that PTAs have become more and more convinced that MaaS is the adequate alternative to owning a car, promising even more expansive flexibility: if you were to have a personal master key to any transport option in your pocket, why would you ever rely only on one specific vehicle? This is further supported by ever-accelerating public and private tenders looking for software companies to provide working MaaS solutions. This excitement is nonetheless tainted with three extremely pervasive issues:
Comparing solutions, without first going over and prioritizing the actual challenges these solutions ambition to solve, is a futile endeavor. The following elements constitute the key challenges that any MaaS solution is expected to address:
All of these challenges suggest that MaaS is much more than just another app in your already overloaded phone screen. If a city is really looking to provide a master key to access any transport option for their residents as a legitimately better alternative to owning a car, this key has to make urban mobility networks more sustainable, effective, equitable, connected, and safe. This also implies that the main challenges now lie in the urban centers, which does not mean that rural areas or intercity traveling is not important. On the contrary, these use cases have many more significant challenges that would require completely new solutions to supplement urban, intracity MaaS.
These issues and the current understanding of MaaS do not go hand in hand, which is why we think the definition of MaaS and its understanding should be broadened up and unpacked into a clear developmental roadmap.
Founded in Vilnius, Lithuania, Trafi has been revolutionizing urban mobility since 2013. Our MaaS platform is designed to run even the most complex transport systems and has been trusted by Berlin (BVG), Brussels (STIB), Portsmouth & Southampton (Solent Transport), Munich (MVG), and Zurich (SBB).
Trafi’s mission is to empower cities with state-of-the-art MaaS solution that helps to tackle their mobility challenges and to achieve ambitious sustainability objectives. Our white-label product offers all the features and components needed to launch your own-branded MaaS service. With more than 50 existing deep integrations to mobility service providers and payment facilitators, we help to reduce risk, cost, and time-to-launch for new services.
Imagine that instead of owning the key that unlocks your own personal vehicle, you are handed a personal key to any given vehicle. This is exactly where the promise of Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) lies — a seamless access point to the complete mobility spectrum. The whole idea can be seen not only as a promising concept for the end-user but also as an alternative to the private car that cities want to push out. As attractive as it may seem, the concept of MaaS also carries a lot of misconceptions. In a series of articles, we aim to dispel this fog with what we call the ‘MaaS Fundamentals’ that are the key to actually unjamming urban mobility.
A couple of years ago, a joint research group of ten civil engineering, economics, and environmental experts, stretching from the University of East Anglia to the University of Sydney, published a sweeping paper analyzing the carbon footprint of the United Kingdom cities.* Their analysis, regardless of its short length, is impactful enough to startle even the most inattentive readers: one of the report’s main findings was that London City alone accounted for 15.5 tons of CO2 emissions every year. Another startling observation showed that Londoners from the adjacent borough of Newham produced on average 34% less CO2 emissions in the same exact period. It is true that Newham is primarily a residential borough while London City is predominantly a commercial one, but this disparity in emission levels suggests that the bigger the salary, the likelier a Londoner is to travel by car.
Now, what would happen if people decided to give up their cars and rely exclusively on on-demand services? The answer can be found in a fascinating report made in Chicago. Last October, Mayor Lori Lightfoot published a long-awaited and publicly available analysis regarding ride-hailing companies operating in Chicago’s downtown area. It starts with a seemingly benign insight: in the four-year window between 2015 and 2018, Chicagoans increased their reliance on ride-hailing companies almost three-fold, which is music to the ears of those fighting for lower car ownership numbers. However, this outcome has come at a high cost:
In short, people with lower income tend to move in much more sustainable ways. On the other hand, affluent people tend to ride alone and significantly decrease connectivity for everyone else. This fits perfectly with multi-billionaire Elon Musk’s vision: in the near future, affluent people will rely on individualized transport (hyperloops, Tesla cars, or even rockets) rather than on anything public and shared.
Finally, all the aforementioned issues have led to a situation where even taking a stroll and simultaneously breathing has somehow become a lethal activity. Researchers at King’s College London are suggesting that particles coming from car brakes are just as harmful as fumes coming from exhaust pipes, affecting our immune system. One could argue that regenerative braking, a default feature in electric cars now, should help tackle both dust and CO2 emissions. But should we expect every single car owner in the world to line up and lease a new electric car this year?
Every single reader of this article, no matter their socioeconomic status, should easily name the last time they were lectured that car is not the problem and that the problem is rather how we utilize the car or its design. On top of that, we seem to lack imagination when it comes to envisioning a future without cars:
Who wouldn’t want to live in the heart of London or Chicago, and not be forced to share their rides? Either by taking a personal car or, better yet, by hailing an affordable personal driver. What everyone should agree on is that having easily accessible transport is necessary, but that owning your own car is not. So, let’s finally say it together out loud: car-centricity is the problem.
Founded in Vilnius, Lithuania, Trafi has been revolutionizing urban mobility since 2013. Our MaaS platform is designed to run even the most complex transport systems and has been trusted by Berlin (BVG), Brussels (STIB), Portsmouth & Southampton (Solent Transport), Munich (MVG), and Zurich (SBB).
Trafi’s mission is to empower cities with state-of-the-art MaaS solution that helps to tackle their mobility challenges and to achieve ambitious sustainability objectives. Our white-label product offers all the features and components needed to launch your own-branded MaaS service. With more than 50 existing deep integrations to mobility service providers and payment facilitators, we help to reduce risk, cost, and time-to-launch for new services.
Mobility is a particularly challenging topic for most cities around the globe. Each urban area has its own specificity, but they all have one thing in common: the necessity to create a sustainable, regulated, equitable and easy-to-navigate mobility ecosystem to ensure the general welfare of their citizens.
Going forward the large majority of people will live in cities, or in close proximity to cities. The increasing urbanization is putting huge pressure on municipalities to manage their infrastructure more systematically. Looking at any city ranking (in terms of livability and ability to attract the best talent), the quality of the mobility offer plays a central role.
If you add the heightened societal demand to get access to sustainable mobility (with low carbon and energy footprint), and the explosive growth of new modes of transportation, we are going to experience nothing less than a perfect storm. Cities are being challenged by disruptive companies. Together with other more traditional players, like car OEMs, cities have until today been on the defensive, reacting rather than proactively driving the change. It is time that they make a move.
Municipalities will have to hurry to the center of the storm, simply because they own the physically limited infrastructure and control regulation as well as taxation that govern the entire system. Public transit forms a central pillar of moving around the city, and contrary to private operators, there is no underlying interest of profits or a successful business model. The raison d’être for cities is to improve the daily life of its residents, and at the same time ensure equity among the population. This is not an easy riddle to solve, and there are several obstacles along the way that we need to address immediately.
Adding up to the issues we are used to discussing, such as air and noise pollution, cities are facing several upcoming challenges. The plethora of modern mobility service providers flooding the streets are shaping mobility in unknown directions, outdated mobility tools and technology are used to manage mobility and shared transportation is not living up to users’ expectations. As if this was not enough, the entire ecosystem of transportation could become monopolized by private providers, should the cities fail to address the challenges of urban mobility.
There is an interesting mix between traditional public transit agencies and private mobility providers in most cities. However, these mobility modes are usually separated rather than connected. In the current set-up, we detect two risks arising from the segregated mobility market:
2. The need for a digital twin
Most approaches to mobility management tend to be quite rigid: the tools are outdated and require very specific knowledge to operate. The only partial digitization still entails a lot of manual work that might lead to inaccurate information.
At the moment, there are no digital twins of how the real-life city moves. Digitizing the physical infrastructure would be highly beneficial for the city and citizens alike. For the citizens, it would create a seamless experience to match recent upgrades in other sectors. (i.e. Here, we could offer a solution that could be the Netflix or Amazon of transportation). For the cities, it would mean finally getting a full overview of the transportation network. When gathering insights on how people move (or want to move), cities can adapt their mobility system and incentivize certain types of transport based on events, weather or influx of people.
In the long run, imagine a city where shared mobility gets more affordable and covers all use cases, from driving children to school to going on holidays. You will have cities that understand the needs of both people and service providers. Based on real-time data, mirroring supply and demand, the right set of regulations are put in place, making sure that the entire system works as one for a seamless, sustainable and safe service.
3. The inefficiency of shared transportation
Another pressing issue, coming as a surprise to no one, is that shared transportation does not match the increasing user expectation. The public transit network is often unreliable and unpredictable, and commuters tend to have more diverse use cases than it covers. To become competitive, public transit agencies need to step up their game and become more flexible.
Emerging ride-hailing and shared mobility options are attracting more and more people. Some who might otherwise have used public transit or their private car. It is in the hands of cities to take these conclusions and to act on it: add more bus lines, tweak train and metro schedules, provide dynamic routes and integrate first and last-mile options. Taking charge of the full system, connecting the public transit network to new mobility modes puts the city back in the driving seat and can prove to be an efficient driver of more — rather than less — public transit.
4. Private players threaten to monopolize the market
The mobility ecosystem can be divided into three platforms representing the people, the transport providers, and the city itself. Currently, each platform functions as a stand-alone unit, where development and decisions are made in silos.
When it comes to the transport providers, we see a worrying trend arising: quite a few private players want to take the role of the mobility integrator for the city. However, this would lead to a situation where commercial operators would control mobility and shape infrastructure without being responsible for its upkeep. In extension, the city itself would lose access to visibility and insights. This would lead to infrastructure and policy based on assumptions rather than information based on actual real-time data.
To ensure sustainable urban mobility, we must enable the city, consumers and transport providers to act in close collaboration, with one transcending goal: a sustainable, easy-to-access, affordable and frictionless mobility experience for all.
Mobility experts all over the world are experimenting to find solutions to deal with the ever-increasing urbanization and in consequence, moving masses of people in limited spaces. This is not a simple question with a simple answer.
We see that the old paradigms like a strict split into rail-based public transit and private road-based mobility will make way to a new era of intelligent mobility, where multiple forms of mobility will coexist and complement each other seamlessly, where fair access to mobility must be ensured and above all, and where mobility must be managed more systematically.
At Trafi, our mission is to provide cities with the right digital tools so that they can take back control of their transportation network and proactively drive the transformation towards integrated, intelligent and democratic urban mobility.
Founded in Vilnius, Lithuania, Trafi has been revolutionizing urban mobility since 2013. Our MaaS platform is designed to run even the most complex transport systems and has been trusted by Berlin (BVG), Brussels (STIB), Portsmouth & Southampton (Solent Transport), Munich (MVG), and Zurich (SBB).
Trafi’s mission is to empower cities with state-of-the-art MaaS solution that helps to tackle their mobility challenges and to achieve ambitious sustainability objectives. Our white-label product offers all the features and components needed to launch your own-branded MaaS service. With more than 50 existing deep integrations to mobility service providers and payment facilitators, we help to reduce risk, cost, and time-to-launch for new services.
