Just quickly enter the destination, navigation on and off you go: Almost everyone knows Google Maps from everyday life. The US company’s app shows the shortest route to get from A to B by car or train. And Google goes one step further: the app is increasingly intended to display more complex connections with other modes of transport – and at the same time become the platform for booking them.
The approach is called Mobility-as-a-Service, or MaaS for short – and it is currently experiencing a hype like no other trend in the mobility sector. In addition to Google, other providers are also trying to connect the various private and public transport services. Freenow, for example, a joint venture between the car manufacturers BMW and Mercedes-Benz, which is already represented in over 150 cities in ten European countries. Or Moovit from the Intel group. At the local level, Jelbi, a Berlin public mobility app, offers a route planner for public transport and sharing services. But it has the greatest potential: the Alphabet subsidiary Google.
Around a billion people already use Google Maps every month. And Group CEO Sundar Pichai (51) is currently expanding Google Maps into a super app
, through which you can not only navigate, but also book restaurants or hairdresser appointments and order food directly. The consumer mobility area, which seamlessly follows the current usage behavior of the app, is considered to be a beacon of hope. Through partnerships, Google’s development teams integrate, for example, subways and suburban trains, including access to their ticket systems, into the app.
“We started five years ago, we now have 500 cities live with 72 operators most recently,” said Britta Duerscheid recently at a micromobility trade fair in Amsterdam. The Google Maps manager takes care of the development of strategic partnerships. Google Maps already shows bicycles and scooters from the sharing services DB Call a Bike, Donkey Republic, Tier and many others in numerous German cities.
The Netflix of city traffic
The idea behind Mobility-as-a-Service is to react to people’s changed mobility behavior by combining mobility services from public and private providers. Arguing in terms of climate policy, this would be a contribution to the mobility turnaround. For the providers of the platforms, however, it is also about a business. In practice, users should plan, book and pay for their route using all available means of transport – for example buses, trains, car and bike sharing, rental cars, taxis and electric scooters – via a single platform. The MaaS provider, in this case Google Maps, puts together the various means of transport as a mobility bundle – a kind of Netflix for city traffic.
The expansion happened in several stages. Google Maps integrated Deutsche Bahn offers into its search years ago. The app “displays real-time information for hundreds of train journeys every day and includes a ticket link button that takes you directly to the DB platform to book the ticket,” Duerscheid explains to manager magazin. Similarly, public transport operators such as the Hamburger Verkehrsverbund HVV are integrated into Google Maps.
According to Duerscheid, Google is now looking for further “win-win partnerships” from which Google and the private micro-mobility providers should benefit equally. Finally, the app provides customers to the sharing providers, and their brand name becomes more visible on Google Maps.
Booking and paying for the services has so far mostly taken place on the external websites of the providers. But that too could change soon. In the future, Google could fully integrate its own payment service, Google Pay, and earn money from every single transaction – a few percent commission for every bus ticket sold and every scooter ride.
Companies smell billion dollar business
The potential is enormous. In 2021 the global MaaS market became one Investigation by P&S Intelligence
reportedly valued at $128.5 billion. According to the market research institute, sales should increase to around 520 billion dollars by 2030.
One thing is clear: Mobility-as-a-Service is still in its infancy. In recent years there has been great progress in technical and industrial terms and more integration, more standardization, more collaboration, says Natalia le Gal, founder of the specialized consulting firm Behava. “But users aren’t really flocking to MaaS apps yet.”
In order for travelers to take advantage of such offers, the added value is crucial, says Duerscheid. “Even if users care about sustainability in their means of transport, the standard use case is that they want to get from A to B efficiently,” says the Google manager. “And for that, time and money are the most important factors.” There are therefore two options: the apps must either offer faster route options – or grant price discounts.
The physical and digital world are becoming more closely linked
Part of the answer lies in the technology: Google Maps not only wants to expand the range of transport services, but also use new functions to show its users the best possible way to get from A to B. According to Duerscheid, many different factors such as road quality, traffic forecasts, cycle paths or public transport should also be analyzed through the use of artificial intelligence. For example, Google recently introduced new features for cyclists: for example, the company worked with the city governments in Berlin and Munich to display the exact percentage of cycle paths on a certain route and other cycle route information.
At the same time, Google Maps sees itself as a digital image of the entire world. “We went from a 2D visualization to a multidimensional view of the world,” says Duerscheid. That’s why the introduction of the so-called “immersive view” for cyclists is imminent: With this, cyclists should be able to visualize each section of a route before the journey. As if from a bird’s eye view, you can see what the bicycle lane looks like, how many traffic lights there are, how much traffic is to be expected, what the air quality is like and what the weather will be like, explains Duerscheid. In the coming months, the function will be in Germany be activated for Berlin.