Exploring preferences in the Netherlands for MaaS mobility packages, as a transportation alternative for short-distance trips: A Stated Preference Experiment: Mobility as a Service

Cities of the Netherlands are the driving forces to develop and encompass a cluster of markets that boost productivity. In recent times, cities have tended to demonstrate the rapid transformation, more spatially dispersed and growing in demand for transportation. Reasonably, all the trips done intra-city are short-distance trips (i.e. trips less than 10km) accounting for approximately 30% of a person’s total trips per month.To make these short-distance trips for various trip purposes, the majority of the Dutch people prefer using their private cars or private bike. Thus, over the years, the usage of private transportation in the Netherlands has increased leading to an upsurge in roadway congestion and lack of parking space. The observations from the literature suggest that more than 50% of car usage for different trip purposes are non-essential and could be shifted to ‘other modes’. Further, short-distance mobility poses as a core challenge for sustainable mobility, accounting for 60% of emissions in the city.Therefore, there is a need for sustainable transportation and this could be achieved by providing Mobility as a Service (in short MaaS) which could be defined as “A service attributed to integrate various forms of transport services into a solo mobility service, accessible on demand”It is a novel approach to service bundling enabled technology that facilitates the usage of multiple means for travel. It has recently attracted more interest and it is observed that the notion of MaaS tends to be linked to the context of multi-modal transportation. However, it is still unknown regarding the true influence of MaaS for unimodal (i.e. short-distance) trips, spurring a clear gap in the available literature on MaaS. Hence, the main research question for the study is formulated as follows“What is the preference of Dutch people, regarding MaaS mobility package as a transportation alternative (to status-quo mobility pattern), for carrying out short-distance trips?”To achie
Civil Engineering | Transport and Planning