Abstract

hough some “Mobility as a Service” (MaaS) initiatives have been piloted across Europe, so far most of them had problems reaching a significant scale and stable business operation, and there is still a lack of a solid MaaS experience replicable at the EU level. Achieving the appropriate balance between public and private components in the combined mobility scheme is a major issue, with the need of compromising between different business roles, objectives and attitudes within the same ecosystem. The adoption of viable policies for information and service sharing is also a barrier to overcome. To remain the “backbone of mobility” for liveable and sustainable cities, Public Transport should embrace the emergence of those new mobility services and concepts, together with the development of the autonomous vehicles, as great opportunities to enhance the efficiency and capacity of its services and systems and to gain new customers. This paper analyses the opportunities and the challenges for the public transport sector to play a leading role in providing mobility as a service, with the autonomy revolution as a key enabler.