By Marko Javornik, COMTRADE (written on 23 October 2017)

I’m just on my way from Berlin, where I had the privilege to give a keynote speech at the Wocomoco conference. Wocomoco – as it can be seen by its name – is not just a usual conference on mobility services, but really tries to bring new, innovative and different perspectives to the table from around the globe – many great speakers and ideas, lots of great discussions, and an excellent opportunity for me to reflect.

I was really happy to see that the vision of MaaS is now becoming widely accepted as the better future. MaaS is about seamless and user-centric integration of various transport services into a single mobility service that’s accessible on demand. I am happy that the benefits of this approach are now becoming clear to everyone and that there are many initiatives underway to make this vision a reality – as it can be observed from the MaaS Alliance Map.

The discussion about MaaS is no longer about “if“ and “why”. It has moved to the next level: it is about “when”, but most importantly about “who” and “how”. And here it becomes obvious that while the vision is really great, the implementation is absolutely not easy and trivial. As a member of MaaS Alliance and a leader of the ‘Single Market’ working group, I have deep insight into the activities and as much as I would love to see MaaS accelerate into our reality, I currently see serious roadblocks ahead. The MaaS ecosystem is huge and involves digital and physical complexities and it needs to deal with specifics of each city and country. It will take time to find a sustainable and balanced approach that will handle all these complexities.

Read the rest of this blog on the COMTRADE website here.