In the Netflix of Transportation, who will be Narcos?

The three mainstays of my past four months in Barcelona have been my employer Glovo, my beloved FC Barcelona and my new found love in this city called TMB or Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona.

The broad pillars that support my faith on these brands are their ability to make cities more accessible and delightful, exhibit inclusiveness and the aspiration to be ‘Més que’ (more than) than their counterparts and the mobility geek inside me loves MaaS (Mobility as a Service) for the exact same reasons.

MaaS at its best will make Cities more accessible, make freedom of mobility more inclusive and is ‘Més que’ any standalone ride sharing or public transportation system. However, an aggregation of services will always open the scope for the existence of some form of what I would like to call as the Pareto war and it would be interesting to see it play out in the MaaS arena.

The famous Pareto principle, which has stood the test of time across innumerable class rooms, case studies and conference calls as the 80/20 rule basically tells that resources or in this case customer preferences aren’t usually distributed equally.

A simple example would be to take the case of an ecommerce platform that has 150 odd categories but a bulk of its sales might come from the category called Electronics with another category called Furniture contributing to a miniscule amount.

Any MaaS platform is going to have a bundle of services like public transportation options, bike sharing, ride sharing, traditional taxis and others. Something that fascinates me is to see which services really have the ability to win the pareto war.

Scenario 1 — The ability to make public transportation complete and sexy!

With MaaS, the first and last mile connectivity problems that act as a deterrent to increase adoption and usage frequency for a public transportation service gets largely solved and hence if the supply is sufficient and punctual, there is a chance that more people might start using public transportation services more frequently thereby helping the associated operators gain higher revenues, utilization. It will also be a big win for our cities as a win for public transportation services has the ability to reduce personal automobile usage and the problems that come along with it at a larger scale

Scenario 2 — Taxi rides and ride sharing become cheaper and hence more popular!

Another common factor that connects my favourite brands and MaaS is the scope for having a subscription based business model. A subscription based business model comes with a great scope to build a user base that is highly engaged and loyal but it also nudges the user to seek as much value as possible out of the subscription fee that they are paying for within any specific time period.

Taxis and ride sharing services have a perceived higher value than a bus or a metro and also in most of the cases are faster and offer door to door convenience without any change of modes. While it is obvious that this option will always be made available with some usage restrictions, it would be safe to bet that this mode of transportation is highly likely to be amongst the winners of the pareto war.

This provides a very favourable situation for ride sharing and taxi operators as a MaaS system will then have the ability to expose them to a wider user base and also effectively improve their fleet utilisation thereby leaving an uptick in a golden metric called marketplace efficiency that might then help them stabilize hourly driver earnings.

Will MaaS has the ability to push more people who currently use cars as their preferred mode of transportation to adopt public transportation services or will the existence of a MaaS platform push more people who are currently using public transportation services to now start replacing some if not all of their trips with ride sharing, bike sharing or taxi rides?

Using the Pareto lens will provide some good insights for sure but one must not forget that the real enemy here is ‘personal automobile ownership’ and any result of the Pareto war would still be considered a win if the system has the overall ability to reduce the number of personal automobiles and its associated problems that plague our Cities.

A sweeter version of the win however would be to have enough data points to maybe show an operator like TMB that why participating in a MaaS program might be a great option for them as when public transportation wins, the win can be considered as a more inclusive one as it will leave a positive impact on a wider section of the population that might not have access to or lack the understanding of technology which in this case can be a very simple and easy to use app.

Solving the ‘Where to?’ question can be as interesting as solving the ‘Plata o Plomo’ one.