The Rotterdam MaaS experience was an initiative of De Verkeersonderneming, the municipality of Rotterdam and carrier RET. The project was an experiment in which 100 Rotterdam households were given the opportunity to try out Mobility as a Service. The intention was to leave one’s own car as much as possible and to use shared mobility and public transport instead. A budget was made available for this, with which flexible travel could be tried out. Participation in the experiment was conditional on cooperation in research in the form of intake interviews, interviews, surveys and analysis of travel behaviour.
Mobility offer:
- Public transport, water bus, public transport bicycle and bicycle shed
- Go-bike electric bike
- Mobike shared bike
- Felyx electric scooter sharing
- Greenwheels shared car
- Snappcar shared car
- Uber taxi
- water taxi
- Transvision taxi
Approach:
- 100 participants received a budget to travel for 4 months, during which they could choose from an extensive mobility offer. The mobility offer from which the participant could choose expanded every month with additional carriers participating;
- During the experiment, it was continuously measured how active the use of services was and what the drivers and obstacles were for this;
- At the end of the 4 months, participants were given the opportunity to take advantage of a follow-up offer: Travel for another 2 months, but with a partial personal contribution. The follow-up offering was used to test different pricing models.
Some insights and learning points (download here the final report of the research)
- It is important to enthuse and continue to guide participants before and during the project. We did this by speaking to everyone personally during an intake interview. During the project we guided participants through our customer service and organizing participant meetings. This created involvement and also allowed participants to inspire each other.
- Shared mobility is seen by many as a replacement for the entire public transport or car journey. Shared mobility is only seen to a limited extent as a solution for part of the chain journey. Thinking in terms of chain travel is not yet ingrained in the mindset of a large part of the participants in the research.
- Tensions and uncertainties in the use of sharing services are a major challenge in their acceptance. The chance of misunderstanding, incorrect travel information and the way in which other users use means of transport form obstacles for some of the researchers to embrace shared mobility.
Find out more about this project?
Contact project manager Christiaan van Veen on 088 – 9343406.
Are you curious about all the results and insights of this project? Download here the final report of De Verkeersonderneming in collaboration with research agency Ideate.