[Interview with MaaS Alliance Senior Manager Piia Karjalainen.]

What is the biggest benefit of MaaS?
MaaS is basically providing you a better everyday mobility with several options based on your own preferences – without any hassle or confusion. I truly believe that it also makes our mobility much more sustainable by increasing the use of public transport and shared mobility over private vehicles. This also makes MaaS as an attractive solution from the policy-making perspective: it is quite easy to sell to people an environmentally compliant transport system with full of choices when compared with the current policies which are often led by sticks instead of carrots, such as taxes or restrictions.

What is the biggest challenge for MaaS adoption and introduction?
Real-life MaaS implementations of MaaS show that hindrances of MaaS roll-out are not on the demand side – instead all experiences show that people love MaaS! But what may slow down the development is the lack of trust and ability to see the big picture. Traditionally transport sector has been orchestrated by the public authorities, they have dictated how the transport system should be operated. Always it hasn’t lead to the best possible solution. Now it is important to listen always the end-users first: what they really expect and how we can fulfill their needs?

I wish that one day we would have such an agile and dynamic transport system that the user no longer need to adapt his or her behavior to match to the available mobility options but mobility options would be customized according to needs and expectations of the user.

How will MaaS change when AVs are introduced?
Personally I see it mainly as a matter of your personal time. When transported by AV you are no longer committed to pay all your attention to driving. I presume that then we will see a big boom of different entertainment and value-added services integrated into MaaS offerings.

Read the full article, including interviews with other women in shared mobility, on the movmi website here.