↑  Boyd Cohen, PhD. & CEO of IoMob

Very insightful article here about core issues in MaaS and Micromobility

Micromobility & MaaS: 4 Dichotomies

It has been almost a year since the founders of Micromobility Industries Oliver Bruce et Horace Dediu interviewed me on their podcast series to discuss the iomob.net vision on the role of micromobility in Mobility as a Service platforms.

Since that time, both segments of the mobility industry, micromobility and MaaS seem to have exploded to another level of conversation and action in cities around the globe. Every transportation-related conference has tracks on these topics now and virtually every player in the industry (airlines, rail and bus operators, transit authorities, transport infrastructure players, etc.) are trying to understand how they can participate in or regulate or enable micromobility and MaaS.

At Iomob, we believe micromobility, both privately owned and shared, is definitely here to stay and will only continue to grow its share of urban mobility journeys. We also of course are just as bullish on the future of MaaS, although we have some strong opinions about what that future should or will look like.

I would like to re-explore our views on micromobility and MaaS after finally moving from envisioning the intersection to being one of the few companies to have built a full stack MaaS solution that includes deeply integrated micromobility services, starting with Circ, one of the largest pan-European scooter sharing services. When I say deeply integrated, I mean supporting micromobility discovery, intermodal routing to incorporate scooters as part of a first/last mile solution in an intra or intercity journey, unlock, lock and pay for the use of the scooter inside a 3rd party MaaS app. In our case we first deployed this deep integration of Circ only a few weeks ago.

We have learned a lot form working with the Circ team and API as well as our enterprise client, Renfe to support deeply integrated scooters for different journey types. As Iomob moves towards integrating dozens of micromobility services in the coming weeks and months, I’d like to share some of the insights we have learned and food for thought as those in the micromobility industry, and the MaaS sector explore collaborations. The following four dichotomies reflect some of the different approaches we are seeing unfold.

1. Light vs. Deep Integration

While in talks with some of the biggest micromobility players in the world, we were surprised by how few were either technically or commercial ready to support deep integration. Thankfully this is changing rapidly. We believe light integrations of micromobility are virtually useless to many users and kill the true spirit of MaaS which should be to allow users seamless access to discover, route, book and pay for a range of public and private mobility services inside one app without having to leap out.

This is of course the primary distinguishing feature between journey planners and MaaS solutions. Journey planners guide users to a range of services while true MaaS solutions allow them to also book (unlock) and pay for those services inside the app. While those from smaller cities or in markets where scooters have not arrived (or are currently banned) may find this hard to believe, there are cities in Europe, like Madrid, where there are 20 different scooter services who have licenses to offer shared scooters. Deep integration will be the future of micromobility and MaaS.

2. Dockless vs. Station-based Micromobility Sharing Systems

Another important factor for micromobility in MaaS platforms is the system choice of the operator, dockless vs. station-based. The benefit for MaaS players of station-based micromobility is the predictability and clarity around where the vehicles can be parked. Dockless of course bring in more unpredictability about where they will be at given times and where they can be parked. In Barcelona the City outlawed fully dockless deployments so several operators existed in a grey area by supporting locking functionality and requiring users to at least lock the shared vehicles to public bike racks (which are rarely available with open APIs nor do we have access to real-time information about available parking capacity). Now, the micrombiltiy services are going underground in Barcelona, reaching agreement with private parking garage operators.

3. Reservations vs. On-Demand Only
The predictability issue mentioned above is a big issue for those of us with intermodal algorithms and deep integrations seeking to support modal shift by providing users the confidence they can get out of their cars with the knowledge their whole journey is accessible in an affordable, timely and enjoyable way. For example, my own personal journey to my office involves taking a private bike to the train station, leaving the bike parked in a public rack, commuting by train, and then when there is a shared scooter available I take it from the terminal station of the train to my office. But I have no way of knowing before I leave my house if a scooter will in fact be available when I arrive to the station.

We believe in the future, we will be able to increase the predictability of a scooter being available at certain times. In the meantime, it would greatly benefit users and MaaS operators if micromobility companies would support reservations of 15 minutes or so in advance. Even if the user’s journey is longer than that, Iomob could at least automatically reserve a scooter within the 15 minute arrival time if the user requests this.

4. Commoditized vs. Walled Gardens

Micromobility services worry that by participating in MaaS platforms, especially those that compel deep integration, they will lose their “ownership” of the user and become commoditized. Some micromobility services may thrive with walled gardens, especially those that are owned by global rideahiling behomths who have massive installed user bases. But many others, even well financed ones, will struggle to obtain and maintain high vehicle utilization rates in the face of significant competition in many cities especially in Europe (like the 20 shared scooter services in Madrid) and especially when regulators limit the number of scooters each service can distribute. Also, our research of mobility users has confirmed what we all know already, people hate to discover, download and onboard new mobility services when they travel, especially when they will only be in a city or country for a few days.

Yet, we also believe commoditized vs walled gardens is in fact a false dichotomy. After listening to these valid commoditization concerns from numerous mobility providers (not just micromobility services), we realized at Iomob that we need to support loyalty programs of micromobility services inside the MaaS app. We are now working to incorporate this into our routing results, UX and UI so that a user who is loyal to and has discounts or loyalty points with a scooter service for example, will be able to not only integrate their loyalty relationship in the Iomob white label app, but we will also allow the user to have different routing results that are biased towards their preferred brands. Let’s stick with the Circ example.

If a user of the Renfe app built by Iomob has a volume user discount with Circ, why can’t we support that being reflected in their purchase in the app? And, furthermore, why can’t we let the user get biased routing results? Not biased by what benefits Iomob, but rather what the user deems preferable? They may be willing to walk 1 or 2 or even 3 blocks further to reach the nearest Circ scooter because of the benefits they accrue or perhaps because they feel more comfortable with the scooters they are used to. It’s even feasible a user may feel that if there is a Circ scooter relatively close to the train station, than they prefer to take that 3 kilometers instead of a Cabify ridehailing vehicle or taxi (both also deeply integrated into Iomob).

Conclusions

Micromobility is here to stay in our cities, both dockless and station-based. While journey planners offer some value to users and operators, the future of seamless mobility will be deeply integrated, intermodal routing, MaaS solutions. We will continue to see innovations in the products (bikes, scooters, and more) and soon we will see micromobility operators increase their support for advanced reservations while likely embracing loyalty programs to try to create customer “lock-in” to their brands inside aggregated MaaS solutions.

About us:
Iomob, which stands for the Internet of Mobility, headquartered in Barcelona, Spain, has built a white label Mobility as a Service solution which combines proprietary algorithms enabling multimodal combinations of public and private services and an application that allows end users to discover mobility services, receive multimodal combinations for their journeys, book and pay for a range of mobility services. Iomob has won numerous open innovation challenges from organizations like Ford Motors, Renfe and Sweden’s Sustainable Mobility Challenge. Iomob has also participated in prestigious startup accelerators such as Techstars and Wayra and in 2019 has won the Best Mobility Startup of 2019 at the South Summit, The Public Choice Award from ERTICO in 2019, Top Mobility Startup in the Federation of International Automobiles (FiA) Startup Challenge and selected Top 100 Smart Cities Partners by Newsweek.

View original article at medium.com