There’s no doubt that MaaS is a trending topic within the mobility industry today. Piia Karjalainen, Secretary General of the MaaS Alliance, spoke to Intelligent Transport’s Luke Antoniou about the reality of implementing MaaS in our cities.
"The MaaS Alliance was established in 2015, and we’ll be celebrating our fifth birthday in October this year. MaaS Alliance started as a European focused, small network. Today, we are a global community of 100 members from Europe but also Asia Pacific, North America, Emirates and more. As such, we are representing the most developed areas for Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS). We have both public and private partners on board and this collaboration between sectors is crucial for making MaaS fully operational.
This year we are focusing on ticketing, hence our participation at Transport Ticketing Global earlier this year. We held a workshop in conjunction with this event, gathering ideas to see how we can support the public transport industry, and particularly the ticketing industry, to open up the closed-loop ticketing systems to enable them to work in MaaS environment.
Another focus for the Alliance this year is sustainability. As we all know, the transport sector is facing urgent de-carbonization targets. In December 2019 MaaS was recognized by the European Commission as part of the Green Deal, showing their belief in MaaS to deliver more sustainable transport. For us as an industry, it’s very important that we can now demonstrate that MaaS is actually contributing to a smaller carbon footprint. We will provide training for our members and start developing tools, for service providers, but also cities, to assess, monitor and communicate the environmental performance of MaaS."
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