Bringing together New Thinking and Data for the Future of Mobility
The technology revolution offers huge potential for connected, flexible and better travel opportunities but global companies battle for power to carve out the monopolies through which the greatest future profits could be delivered. Which company will run the default software for autonomous cars, or the ‘go to’ place to make new types transport purchase?
Mobility as a Service poses a significant challenge to policy makers. Transport has traditionally been approached in a siloed mentality. Buses have their approach to ticketing, rail has another, aviation has yet another. That works for those industries, and in some cases extremely well for customers, if considered within the confines of that industry. After all, few can say that nobody has benefitted from a policy decision to liberalise air space, bringing on the boom in low cost airlines.
Mobility as a Service looks across these silos and looks to deliver a good service to the end customer. To realise its benefits not only requires policy interventions, but a new approach to how transport policy is developed.
Creating an environment of boundless creativity is highly challenging for large and hierarchical institutions. This poses a particular problem for governments, companies, and organisations that wish to support open innovation.
As one of our four core values, open innovation is central to everything we do at TravelSpirit. We established the TravelSpirit Hackout Open Innovation Programme to capture and magnify the value generated by our community projects and accelerate them for maximum impact.
Continue reading “Whitepaper 5: TravelSpirit Hackout Open Innovation Programme”
Earlier in the summer, we canvassed the opinion of 106 people on which parts of the UK would benefit most from MaaS, and which types of organisation were most likely to succeed in providing MaaS in the future. These people who had a natural bias towards being already engaged in discussions on MaaS, and/or who were familiar with new technology as a whole. The short survey was designed to raise debate, and assess the opinion of the respondents,
Continue reading “Whitepaper 4: Will everyone benefit from MaaS?”
A range of autonomous vehicles (AVs), enabled by Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (RAI), are necessary for the evolution of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) as a global resource.
This white paper sets out our initial position and frames the debate around developments in autonomous mobility and how it can shape the new mobility frontier. It identifies concerns about autonomous transport solutions being developed by technologists, without a broader public policy framework. We highlight the risks that this direction of business development poses and how technology-driven innovation may present a serious threat to the vitality of our society.
The TravelSpirit Openness Index for Mobility as a Service is a practical tool to help create openness in developing MaaS projects.
Transport Practitioners are encouraged to download the tool and use it to assess programmes and activities in development.
Continue reading “Whitepaper 2: TravelSpirit Index of Openness in Mobility as a Service”
There are many elements involved in building the open Internet of Mobility. The MaaS ‘ecosystem’ requires contributions from road and rail at the core of public transport to the new disruptors in bike-share and on-demand taxis; to the platform providers which serve up travel options to individual travellers. And in between are various forms of data collection, provision and aggregation, along with the many components of back office payment systems.
In this context what we mean by ‘open’ is many layered. Open can be via the provision and use of open data or open source code. Or, via the growth of local eco-systems of providers who use these open tools to create new businesses and business models. Or through the sharing of data.
‘Closed’, on the other hand, creates proprietary systems which, often as not, will not work with other functionally similar systems within the same sector. Yet convergence is often desirable for efficiency.
Continue reading “Whitepaper 1: Open or Closed? The Case for Openness in Mobility as a Service”
travelspirit.io is set to become a global commons of “Internet of Mobility” infrastructure, networks and code. An accessible resource for mobility operators and transport authorities, with new open source software components licensed under MPLV2
Curated by TravelSpirit Foundation, the “Internet of Mobility” will be built by a global community of organisations and individuals, with a diverse range of business interests (either in terms of different types products and services or application in different geo-spatial and cultural domains) joined together with a common vision and values.