Geography of Mobility as a Service
Résumé
Popularised in Finland (Heikkilä, 2014), Mobility as a Service or MaaS is defined by UITP as an instrument which allows "the integration of, and access to, different transport services [...] in one single digital mobility offer, with active mobility and an efficient public transport system as its basis". The MaaS Observatory ("L’Observatoire du MaaS") is an initiative of the French Ministry of Ecological Transition and CEREMA (Centre for studies and expertise on risks, the environment, mobility and development), which, have developed a tool with their partners for sharing knowledge about MaaS in France. This tool is based on a mapping of ninety-three systems tending towards MaaS, including their detailed characteristics, as well as on a set of working groups whose objective is to produce knowledge on this topic. The study of this public initiative makes it possible to establish a geography of MaaS in France on 1st January 2022, which we will present in this paper. We seek to contribute and deepen the work on the evaluation of MaaS (Jittrapirom et al, 2017), in particular on the spatial institutional challenges and key performance indicators developed in the academic literature (Zhao et al., 2021). We carry out an analysis of the Observatory's databases to describe governance and stakeholders, the scope and modes of transport considered, and the level of service. We will put the nature of MaaS in France into perspective in relation to some emblematic foreign cases analysed by CEREMA. (2019). The challenge is to refine the limits of a geography of MaaS in order to identify its potential to activate inclusive and low-carbon mobility. The first results tend to show that MaaS in France is developed within the urban perimeters of the mobility organising authorities (AOM) with the public transport operators. The AOM-operator pairing remains characteristic of a French way (Ribeill, 1986) and questions the spatial and intermodal integration of mobility in metropolitan areas