This is the story of the genesis of MaaS
by John Rossant & Stephen Baker – 22 Nov. 2019
The Next Time You Trade in Your Car, It Could Be for a Phone
On a frosty fall evening a decade ago, a university student named Sonja Heikkilä stood shivering at a dark bus stop in Helsinki. A Finnish engineering student, Ms. Heikkilä found herself wondering why the miracle machine in her purse couldn’t orchestrate her commute. Her smartphone, after all, had apps for maps and bus tickets. She could use it to call a cab. All of these were elements of a crosstown ride, but each one stood on its own.
She imagined a new type of app, one that could chart the most efficient combination of transit across the city at any moment—and let her buy it all in one place. She built upon the idea for her master’s thesis at Aalto University. Now, it’s real.
The machines that move us around are quickly becoming networked gadgets, generating ever-wider rivers of mobility data. That data is feedstock for a potential transportation revolution, spurred by Ms. Heikkilä and others and known as “Mobility as a Service,” or MaaS for short. It envisions urban dwellers buying subscriptions to bundles of traveling options instead of relying on car ownership. Young people might opt for cheaper packages geared to bike-sharing and trams, while others might spend more and gain access to more taxis and car shares. For private and public transportation operators, potential legions of new subscribers could fill empty seats as their services become easier to access. “It’s not fair that car owners have the freedom of mobility and others don’t,” Ms. Heikkilä says.
Ms. Heikkilä’s idea has been incorporated into her city’s ambitious transportation plan, Helsinki 2025, which aims to offer such smart and efficient transportation options that thousands of Helsinkians can do without their cars. And a Helsinki-based startup, MaaS Global, now has some 10,000 monthly subscribers in the city for a mobility service called Whim. A basic plan at 59.7 euros a month (about $66) offers unlimited bus, tram, subway and ferry rides and discounted local cab rides and car rentals. The priciest plan, at 499 euros, includes limitless local taxi rides and rental cars.
Transportation has been undergoing an information revolution. Practically every conveyance is brimming with sensors and computers.
Harri Nieminen, a 36-year-old designer, has an economy subscription and joined Whim in its early days two years ago. “It’s easy to blend transit now,” says the Helsinki resident. “You can bike somewhere and take a taxi back.” He sold his car a year and a half ago and doesn’t plan to buy another.
In October, MaaS Global raised $32.7 million in a new round of financing led by the investment arm of the British oil-and-gas giant BP and said that it is working on launching efforts in some U.S. cities in the next year. Smaller pilot projects are afoot in Antwerp, Stockholm and Birmingham, U.K. MaaS Global’s youthful CEO, Sampo Hietanen, has grand expectations: In the not-too-distant future, he speculates, different urban networks might enable roaming, so that someone with a Helsinki subscription might travel seamlessly with the same app in Tokyo or San Francisco. “Maybe air travel will be in the subscriptions one day,” he says.
The vision of subscribers ditching their cars for a blend of transit options might sound far-fetched, especially for motorists in auto-centric America. But traffic woes are leading some U.S. cities to desperate measures, even reducing parking to inhibit car traffic. Many are creating more mobility options, such as bikeways and bike-share programs, that transit-planning apps could eventually knit together. And these apps are spreading. German car makers Daimler and BMW are partners in an app, Moovel, that has debuted in Las Vegas and Austin, Texas among other cities. In May, the transit authority in Louisville, Ky., announced its own app that it called the first of its kind in the U.S., allowing travelers to plan and eventually pay for trips on public transit, ride-share and bike-share services.
Powering these new services and business models is the rise of information in a domain long anchored in abject ignorance. Through most of the automobile age, transportation authorities have had only the vaguest idea of where people were and where they were headed. They had little choice but to treat motorists as herds—widening highways where traffic backed up and adding ever more parking. In greater Los Angeles, parking capacity occupies 200 square miles, or five times the area of Paris.
In coming years, next-generation networks will be registering every move by commuters and predicting the next.
Drivers themselves lacked vital information, frantically switching from one radio station to the next to hear about traffic jams. Carpooling was a niche activity, in part because most people lacked the information to coordinate with their neighbors. The waste was prodigious.
But transportation has been undergoing an information revolution. Practically every conveyance is brimming with sensors and computers. A report in September by an IBM business-research arm estimates that within a decade, automobiles will be running 100 times the software they do today.
An early signal of this digital revolution was the rise of ride-share companies. Uber, Lyft and others built their disruptive smartphone services on the bare bones of mobility data. All they required was location, destination and credit-card details. In coming years, next-generation networks will be registering our every move and predicting the next.
Cities including Dubai and Shanghai are advancing plans to build mobility command centers—hubs that will process petabytes of movement data, from the wanderings of semiautonomous cars to the flows of electric bikes and pedestrians. They will use it to manage our comings and goings, to orchestrate the movements of a city like an industrial supply chain.
Success could spell more livable cities, with more green space, cleaner air, fewer fatalities and less painful commutes. Yet this efficiency comes at a price: heavy doses of surveillance and control. This is sure to raise alarms among privacy advocates. The delicate balance facing cities including Helsinki is to reap the rewards of networked mobility without trampling on privacy.
The Finnish response is to distribute the data widely rather than to restrict it. Under a two-year-old law, every moving part of the system—from bike shares to taxis—must provide all essential transit data, including location, on an open standard. This should allow any mobility company the information to develop mini control centers to shuttle users with the greatest efficiency.
Sonja Heikkilä, as you might imagine, is now a Whim subscriber. But now she works on preparing for its wider implications. When city planners were drawing up Helsinki 2025, she says, officials of Finland’s biggest bank, OP Financial, began to worry. Some 10% of the bank’s business came from auto loans and insurance. What would happen to that revenue if car ownership plummeted? The bank hired Ms. Heikkilä to dream up new lines of bank business for carless customers. One, she says, involves providing cars for Finns’ trips to their beloved summer cottages.
As it turns out, the young woman synonymous with anti-auto activism in Helsinki is now busy putting drivers behind the wheel. “People thought I wanted a world without cars,” Ms. Heikkilä says. “But what I want is a world where people don’t need to own cars.”
—Mr. Rossant is founder and chairman of the nonprofit NewCities Foundation. Mr. Baker, a former senior technology writer for BusinessWeek, is the author of “The Numerati.” This essay is adapted from their new book, “Hop, Skip, Go: How the Mobility Revolution Is Transforming Our Lives,” published by Harper Business (which, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp).
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