Mobility as a Service: state of the art overview, criticalities, Italian proposals and analysis of people’s opinions and behaviour

Mobility as a Service Carbon neutrality is more than ever a crucial topic in today’s world, with cities being more and more polluted each year. Private transport is surely part of the problem, with cities congestion a direct consequence of the non-sustainable individual usage of car vehicles. Mobility as a Service is a new concept that gained a lot of interest in the last ten years, with the goal of finding new paradigms of urban transport leading to a less polluting and less congested cities. In these years in fact, a big amount of research and studies have been carried out to analyse the strength and weaknesses of this concept, with different pilot projects all over the world. These projects have shown how MaaS implementation is not straightforward and can be conducted with very different visions, from architecture to business models and services offered to the users. Thus, MaaS realization is still an open question, with several partial answers but not a standardized efficient one. Italy has published its own guidelines for MaaS realization, but still, these are not sufficient for implementing a successful project, needing each participating Italy’s region to implement their own solution. This research aims to provide an overview of the MaaS concept, analysing its structure, criticalities, and success factors through literature review, considering European and Italian projects. For this purpose, a literature review of studies around MaaS and analysis of Italian proposals are conducted, to highlight strength and weaknesses of this controversial mobility paradigm. Italian council of ministers have published the official notice for implementing MaaS in Italy thanks to the PNRR investments, thus it will be examined to understand what the Italian vision of mobility as a service is. Then proposals from Turin and Milan will be analysed, observing the vision of these two cities about this topic. Moreover, to investigate users’ perception and consideration of mobility as a service, a survey has been conceived and a questionnaire designed. Thanks to the survey it is possible to understand what the actual mobility choices of interviewees are and what are their opinions regarding the new way of thinking urban mobility represented by MaaS, understanding which are the limitations of this mobility concept from a user perspective. MaaS, in fact, should offer a lot of value to change users’ habits and attract population to participate, but still bringing this value at a fair price. Population, and a wide portion of car users, have not a clear overview of the costs of owning a car, perceiving alternative transport modes as more expensive instead, thus, MaaS objective is to be able of offering a wide variety of services maintaining prices sufficiently low to attract a large number of people, in order to reach social goals like greener and more sustainable society, energy consumption saving and reduce overall pollution.