You might argue that public transit and other for-hire transportation systems have been the full extent of Mobility as a Service (MaaS), primarily seen as a way of increasing public transit ridership and reducing traffic on the road. That might not be the case in the future, and that also will raise questions about investments in public transit , as use of public transit is falling in most major U.S. cities.
There are obvious implications for communications service providers, as just about any MaaS system would be anchored by use of smartphones, which would be the device people use to figure out how to get from one place to another.
In many parts of the United States, however, MaaS competes not with public transit, but with car ownership. in 2017, consumer vehicles in service had reached a 64 percent penetration of the U.S. population, the highest of any country.
So in many cities and urban areas, users need to be convinced that MaaS is a suitable replacement for private car usage, not public transit.
Urban transport solutions in dense environments are easier to envision. In such cases, ridesharing, ridesourcing, use of bikesharing, other modes of conveyance, public transit and all other forms of on-demand transportation, integrated into a single platform, are conceivable.
Access to shared data platforms would allow users to determine the best route and price across several end-to-end travel services and modes, according to real-time data such as traffic conditions, time of day and demand, for example.
It is not yet clear whether MaaS reduces, increases or essentially simply shifts the total amount of traffic on city roads. Obviously, the hope is that MaaS could reduce traffic and pollution. But it is fair to say nobody yet knows what might happen if a fully-developed MaaS system were put into place.
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