Mobility as a Service (MaaS) within Smart City Planning

The terms ‘smart city’ and ‘smart urbanism’ are oftentimes followed by statements about an environmentally friendly, sustainable, and data-driven urban future. Statements as such can be quite assumptive and controversial because the smart city is not homogenous and can vary from location to location. However, a smart city strives to be a technologically driven urban environment that uses a collection of sensors, monitors, and devices to collect specific data and information from humans. The information collected, extracted, and analyzed within the smart city is highly dependent on human interactions with such smart technology. Once the data from the city dwellers and visitors is extracted through the use of smart technology, big corporations, companies, transit agencies, and municipalities can better predict overall usage, patterns, and flows within the smart city. Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) is an emerging form of public and private transportation that allows for MaaS users to book and pay for a trip via smartphone, website, or call centre all through a single platform. MaaS’ overarching goal is to shift away from personal modes of transportation and to reduce overall traffic congestion. MaaS covers a wide variety of public transportation options such as On-Demand Transit (ODT), Automated Vehicles (AV’s), Electric Scooters (e-scooters), etc. ODT and AV’s provide shuttle buses to connect urban dwellers to their destinations, whereas e-scooters are available for a single individual to complete their trip. Therefore, this paper intends to focus on the use of smart technology and IoT within our transportation system and the political divides transportation can create within our built environment. Additionally, this paper will explore how MaaS micromobility options are changing our urban public transportation system and how such change impacts the level of access city dwellers have to such services.