During my life as a traffic engineer, and then an NGO leader and an entrepreneur in the mobility sphere, I have seen plenty of services built around a wish. Sometimes the wish is that people would use more public transportation or make other environmentally sound choices, sometimes the wish is to protect the local or domestic status quo. While there are lots of things I’d wish too, I would never build a business or support a policy built around a wish.

This includes putting the consumer at the center as an object instead of a subject. When that happens to a service, it becomes a tool to steal the decision making power from its customers. This is often the case with municipally-run outfits, or public or private monopolies. The worst, I guess, is when politicians governing a municipally-run operation see it as a channel to force their ideologies upon people. Some might call it democracy; I call it alienating people from the service.

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Read the full article penned by MaaS Global’s Sampo Hietanen on Medium here.