EU MaaS Alliance

Monday 11th of February, headquarters of Transport Systems Catapult in Milton Keynes, UK.

On Monday 11th of February, MaaS Netherlands, part of Connekt, joined the quarterly plenary meeting of MaaS Alliance for the first time. MaaS Alliance is a public-private partnership creating the foundations for a common approach to MaaS, unlocking the economies of scale needed for successful implementation and take-up of MaaS in Europe and beyond. The main goal is to facilitate a single, open market and full deployment of MaaS services.

It was a full day of meeting interesting European and global organisations working on techonologies for and implementations of Mobility as a Service. It was a good opportunity for MaaS Netherlands to get an overview of challenges faced by other international organisations concerning MaaS and their developments. Furthermore we could get a grasp of what MaaS Alliance had organised so far and what topics the members are addressing in several working groups. The topics of the working groups are: ‘Users & Rules’; ‘Governance & Business Models’; and ‘Technology & Standards’.

Next to the working groups MaaS Alliance has a few working documents and publications coming:

• MaaS Alliance will soon publish its progress report on ‘MaaS & Traffic Management 2.0 Task Force’ on how they see current traffic management can and should interact with MaaS.
• A working document, waiting on approval of the members is about ‘Main challenges associated with MaaS – and approaches for overcoming them’.

The second half of the plenary meeting was full of interesting local UK projects, like:

• The cities of Oxfordshire and Newcastle presented about how they embrace and implement MaaS solutions in their areas.
• Company What3Words has a refreshing idea about how to provide location services – highly precise and easy to use for humans. They give every 3x3m a three words code to navigate to.
• Company Tomorrow’s journey provides a platform where vehicle ownerships is linked to demand of vehicles. They are operating in Milton Keynes and looking for possibilities to start in London now too.
• Hosting compandy Transport Systems Catapult gave an overview of the drone development in the UK, or better said: unmanned aircrafts in a system of MaaS. This year the government of UK is launching the Future Flight Challenge (as part of the Aerospace Sector Deal), which will provide up to £125 million to aerospace and other manufactures. ‘This will support the development of electric and autonomous aircraft and transform the future of transport in urban areas as we utilise our airspace to ease congestion.’, stated in this deal.

The next plenary session of MaaS Allicance will be held on the 5th of June in Eindhoven during the ITS European Congress.

Interested to learn more about MaaS Netherlands and/or MaaS Alliance? Please contact Tom van Dam.