For more than a decade, Mobility-as-a-Service has been promoted as a transformative solution to rising congestion, car dependency, and carbon emissions. The promise was attractive: easy journeys across various transport modes, delivered through a single app, encouraging people to leave their cars behind.
Yet today, many transport authorities are asking a difficult but necessary question: was MaaS ever the right way to describe what cities are actually trying to build?
Mobility, as a concept, is centuries old. What changed in the 2010s was not mobility itself, but the technology surrounding it. Cloud platforms, open data, smartphones, and shared mobility services created new opportunities for integration and enhanced user experience.
At the same time, the “as-a-Service” trend was gaining popularity across industries. Hence, the term Mobility-as-a-Service emerged positioning itself as capable of reducing private car use via a B2C model (which later proved to be commercially unsustainable).
A term without a shared meaning
One of MaaS’s greatest weaknesses has always been its lack of a stable definition. Over time, the term has been applied to:
Very different solutions, with very different operational and governance requirements, have all been labelled “MaaS”. As a result, the term has become useful for headlines, but increasingly unhelpful for procurement, delivery, and long-term planning.
Several high-profile MaaS ventures attempted to prove that integrated mobility could be delivered as a self-funding or even profitable service. Backed by significant venture capital, these models relied on subscriptions, commissions, or bundled mobility packages.
Their eventual collapse highlighted a fundamental reality: Find–Book–Pay does not pay for itself at city scale.
This was not a failure of integration or technology. It was a failure of assumptions about who should own, operate, and fund such systems.
Integrated journey planning is part of sustainable transport policy. It determines which options are visible, fast, and convenient for citizens.
Cities and public transport authorities are uniquely positioned to:
Private, venture-led apps face structural challenges in doing this. such as when accessing data, ticketing systems, and negotiating commercial terms with multiple stakeholders.
One of the most resilient integrated mobility platforms (such as BVG Jelbi in Berlin, STIB’s Floya in Brussels) are city-owned, white-label solutions, operated as part of a broader mobility strategy rather than as standalone consumer products.
This approach allows Find–Book–Pay to function as intended:
The problem is not integration, but in the label
The decline of venture-backed MaaS does not mean integrated mobility has failed. It means the industry framed the challenge incorrectly.
What cities need is not “MaaS” as a buzzword. They need trusted, city-owned multi-modal journey planners with (possibly) integrated booking and payment, funded and governed like any other critical transport asset.
Perhaps the most productive next step is a simple one: stop calling it MaaS, and start treating journey planning as what it truly is – a public infrastructure for sustainable mobility.
Learn more from our brochure to understand how to improve a city’s journey planning.
