Transport planning has always had a tendency to generate new terminology. Some terms endure for decades, while others enjoy a brief period of prominence before gradually fading from everyday use.
Mobility as a Service, or MaaS, was once one of the most prominent concepts in transport planning. Today, you hardly hear the term MaaS mentioned at all.
A decade ago it was difficult to attend a transport conference, open a strategic planning document, or scroll through LinkedIn without encountering the term. MaaS was presented as a transformative concept that would fundamentally change how people access transport. Public transport, rideshare, bike share, car share, taxi services and bicycle-based transport services would be integrated into a seamless customer experience. The future of transport appeared to be arriving through a smartphone.
Today, the term is far less visible.
That shift is noticeable in everyday professional discourse. Conference programs that once featured dedicated MaaS streams now tend to frame similar ideas under headings such as “customer experience”, “digital mobility”, or “integrated transport services”. On LinkedIn, MaaS used to appear frequently in transport planning feeds; now it shows up only sporadically, often in retrospective posts. The language has not disappeared entirely, but it has clearly lost visibility.
This observation was reinforced recently while observing changes to the organisational structure of Queensland’s Department of Transport and Main Roads. For a period, MaaS had sufficient prominence to justify dedicated executive leadership within the department. The concept sat close to the centre of transport policy discussions and digital innovation agendas. In more recent structures, MaaS no longer appears as a distinct organisational function. Similar shifts appear to have occurred elsewhere in Australia, where enthusiasm for MaaS as a standalone concept has largely given way to broader discussions around integrated transport, digital platforms and customer-centric service design.
This raises an interesting question: What happened to MaaS?
Uncertainty about the MaaS Legacy
There is a degree of uncertainty when trying to assess the legacy of MaaS.
Did it represent a genuine shift in transport thinking, or did it primarily consolidate and reframe developments that were already underway?
Integrated journey planning provides a useful example. The ability to compare travel options across multiple modes was often positioned as a defining feature of MaaS. Yet travellers were already doing this through platforms such as Google Maps long before dedicated MaaS applications emerged. Likewise, integrated ticketing, real-time service information and multimodal trip planning were already established areas of reform within transport agencies.
This makes it difficult to isolate what, if anything, was uniquely attributable to MaaS as a concept.
Mobility as a Product
Major dictionaries generally define mobility as the ability to move or be moved freely and easily. In transport contexts, it is more commonly used to describe a capacity rather than a discrete offering.
Transport operators provide services that enable this movement. Bus services, rail services, ferry services, taxi services, on-demand vehicles and bicycle-based transport services all contribute to this function. In several Southeast Asian cities, for example, motorcycle taxi networks and app-based bicycle services form an essential part of everyday urban transport supply.
In this framing, mobility was treated less as a condition enabled by transport services and more as something closer to a purchasable product experience.
This conflicts with standard dictionary distinctions between products and services. A product is generally understood as something produced for sale as a standardised or tangible offering. A service is an activity or performance delivered for the benefit of another party. Transport aligns more closely with the latter: it is operational, time-dependent and shaped by network conditions rather than fixed units of consumption.
MaaS attempted to apply product logic to a system that is fundamentally service-based.
The difficulty with this approach is that transport systems are inherently variable. Capacity, timing, geography and demand all influence service delivery in ways that do not translate cleanly into standardised product bundles.
This tension helps explain why MaaS struggled to establish itself as a distinct commercial model, even as many of its component ideas continued to evolve independently within transport practice.
Of course, some of the other difficulties MaaS encountered include fragmented commercial incentives across transport modes and the challenges of aligning operators with different ownership structures, revenue models and regulatory obligations. A further constraint was the role of publicly owned transport operators, which remain the dominant providers of core mobility services in most cities and whose participation is essential to any MaaS model. Their incentives are not always aligned with ceding control over customer interfaces and integration functions to external platforms.
Behaviour, Technology and Transport Outcomes
The underlying ambition of MaaS was to enable behavioural change through technological integration rather than technological novelty in itself.
The intent was to make transport systems easier to navigate, easier to understand and easier to combine across modes, with the expectation that this would shift travel behaviour. In particular, reducing friction between modes was seen as a way to make alternatives to private car use more attractive for certain types of trips.
This was also implicitly linked to sustainability objectives. If non-car modes were more visible, more accessible and easier to combine, then mode shift could be encouraged where viable alternatives already exist.
However, this behavioural objective was not dependent on MaaS as a label. Many of the same outcomes have been pursued through broader investments in digital navigation tools, service integration, and transport infrastructure improvements.
Beyond MaaS
As MaaS has receded as a distinct term, much of what it described remains embedded in transport practice. Journey planning systems, integrated payment platforms, real-time information services and multimodal transport options continue to evolve, largely independent of the MaaS label.
What has changed is the framing through which these developments are interpreted.
Rather than a single conceptual model of mobility delivered as a unified offering, the current trajectory is one of incremental system integration. Digital platforms, customer experience strategies and network planning reforms are advancing in parallel, without requiring a unifying label.
This suggests that MaaS was a temporary narrative wrapper rather than a distinct innovation in its own right. Digital platforms, customer experience strategies and network planning reforms have advanced on their own trajectories, without requiring a unifying MaaS construct to hold them together.
The Language of Transport Planning
The trajectory of MaaS raises a broader issue for transport planning practice.
New terminology can be useful in drawing attention to emerging patterns, but it can also obscure continuity in how transport systems actually evolve. When language becomes the focus, there is a risk that long-standing institutional and technical change is mistaken for the emergence of something entirely new.
For transport planners and traffic engineers, the responsibility is not only to adopt new concepts, but to test whether they genuinely improve understanding of how systems function. Where they do, they are useful. Where they do not, clearer description of existing practice is often preferable.
In that sense, the most important lesson from MaaS may not be about mobility systems at all, but about how easily terminology can temporarily reshape perception of familiar transport realities.
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