Mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) digital marketplace impact on EU passengers’ rights

• Main Author: Erion Murati
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SpringerOpen 2020-11-01
• Series: European Transport Research Review
• Subjects: MaaS; Passengers’ rights; Multimodal contract; Transport platforms; Online marketplaces
• Online Access: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12544-020-00447-1

Abstract Integrated and seamless mobility has been a futuristic vision of mobility for a few years already. Today, Mobility as a Service (MaaS) embodies that vision through the integration of existing and new mobility services into one single digital platform, providing customised door-to-door transport and offering personalised trip or packages planning and payment options. The MaaS concept enable a practical shift from a fragmented and unimodal transport towards a harmonized, centralized and multimodal one, yet the current EU transport law, which is based on the principle of unimodality transport regulation, does not cover any passenger multimodal transport. Thus, as MaaS providers generate multimodal travel chains, it’s problematic that under EU law there is no harmonised legal base for multimodal passenger travel. Moreover, passenger rights cannot be guaranteed when an event occurring during one transport segment affects the following one, if the latter segment is operated with another operator of transport. In light of this, the knowledge gaps that this paper aims to fulfil are to comprehend, on the one hand, the status quo of EU passenger legislation and, on the other hand, the impact of MaaS concept on EU passenger’s rights. This will be achieved by analysing the EU transport law and its adequacy to cover passenger’s rights through a MaaS multimodal journey, as well as the position of a MaaS provider in a travel chain.