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We wrote an awful lot about it: a service that was intended to provide an effective alternative to owning your own car. Mobility is not something that you need to ‘have’, instead you want to be offered the best possible way of travelling from A to B. ‘Mobility as a Service’ (MaaS) was a potential solution for achieving that. In 2018, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management launched its National MaaS Programme consisting of seven different regional pilots, each with its own target group and specific approach. The programme’s aim was to learn from the pilots, create conditions to enable MaaS to succeed and remove any obstacles that might prevent its healthy development on the market.

Zuidas

Amsterdam Regional Transport (Vervoerregio Amsterdam) selected Zuidas as one of its pilot areas. The aim was to test out this service on the business market first. In 2019, the Amaze consortium was awarded the contract to conduct the pilot. Amaze was made up of Overmorgen (now a division of Arcadis), Radiuz (a division of Autobinck), Amber (now part of MyWheels) and Transdev (parent company of Connexxion). So, what happened after that?

Evaluation

Earlier in 2024, an evaluation of the pilot was published. This reveals that MaaS has not proved to be an undivided success. The pilot was launched in what were highly unfortunate circumstances: in early 2020, the coronavirus crisis began. People with lease cars who wanted to travel to Zuidas during this period more or less had the motorway to themselves – hardly the conditions required to experiment with different modes of transport. Working from home became the norm and appears to be set to stay. As a result, the roll-out of the MaaS service was hampered by delays.

Competition

But there was more. Despite promises made in advance, employers in Zuidas appeared unconvinced by the MaaS service. In their view, Amaze had little to offer in terms of added value compared to ongoing contracts with mobility providers (including the NS business card). In addition, the companies that had promised to take part found it expensive to link up their administrative systems to Amaze solely for the purpose of this pilot. A third problem was that the GVB was only able to offer relatively expensive hourly tickets via Amaze. This was caused by both technical and commercial reasons at the GVB. As a result, Amaze was competing with the much more convenient and cheaper public transport chip card and NS business card.

Shared mobility offer

The offer of shared mobility in Zuidas was relatively late to develop. In addition, providers saw little in the way of commercial added value in joining Amaze or, just like GVB, they were prevented by technical and financial factors. Finally, users of the Amaze app were not 100% satisfied with the app that was developed: combining multiple functions (planning/booking/payment) in a logical way proved complicated.

Multiple lessons learned

All in all, a combination of factors meant that the number of users of the MaaS service was far below expectations. Amaze was brought to an end for that reason. But the news is not all bad. After all, a pilot is a way of trying something out. We learned multiple lessons about what works and what doesn’t. And the knowledge acquired will prove highly useful in further research into the question of how digital systems can improve the accessibility of public mobility.

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