User attitudes towards a corporate Mobility as a Service

Mobility as a service (MaaS) envisages enabling a co-operative and interconnected single transport market which provides users with hassle free mobility. Among MaaS postulated benefits, MaaS enthusiasts claim that MaaS solutions could persuade people to give up their car. Conversely, there is a fear that MaaS could in fact induce less sustainable travel, by means of inducing extra demand, and even attract current public transport users towards taxi and car-pool alternatives. In this study we investigate user attitudes and expectations towards a corporate MaaS solution, through a latent class and latent variable model. Results support that there is a trend from car ownership to usership. We also find no evidence that MaaS solutions could produce a shift from public transport users to other less space-efficient shared-mobility solutions such as taxis or car-pool alternatives under our experiment conditions. In connection with user’s preference to share a car journey with strangers, we find the existence of two opposite trends. This finding suggests that there might be appetite for both types of solutions, where users could choose between private or shared journeys by car. Moreover, we find that normative beliefs impact user mobility styles, and that the need and feeling for flexibility is found to be one of the key factors for users to embrace a MaaS solution.
QC 20181218