Mobility-as-a-Service is a model of mobility that provides for the integration of public and private transport services shared with the community and accessible in a smart way through a platform that allows the calculation of routes, access to means of transport and payment of rides. MaaS4Italy is the project financed with €40 million under the PNRR, which will develop systems to integrate mobility data with those of public transport services. The user experience will be facilitated in the choice, use and payment phases so as to reduce the use of one's own vehicle. The first step will be to activate the system in three Italian metropolitan cities, before moving on to the regional level and then to the national level.
The application of the City of Turin, submitted with the technical support of 5T, is also supported by the Piedmont Mobility Agency, the Piedmont Region and the Metropolitan City of Turin, institutions that are already working together on the issue through a memorandum of understanding signed to lay common foundations for cooperation on the digitization of public transport and the activation of MaaS processes. If the city will be selected, the project could start in spring 2023 and will first involve local companies, through incentive mechanisms for sustainable mobility choices for employees, and then all citizens to become structural in 2024.
Among the first three metropolitan cities selected for MaaS4Italy, one will be chosen to host a Living Lab on cooperative, connected and autonomous urban mobility solutions. Turin is also aiming to be chosen for this project, which would be part of the range of services offered by Torino City Lab and CTE NEXT, the House of Emerging Technologies, which, in this field, are already promoting the development and testing of innovative services to simplify local public transport and make it safer and more sustainable.
Chiara Foglietta, Councillor of the City of Turin for Ecological and Digital Transition, Innovation, Mobility and Transport, said: "We are applying because we believe that MaaS can be an opportunity to meet people's needs and demands for travel and improve the liveability and organisation of the city. With MaaS, urban mobility will be more accessible and user-friendly: it will be a real cultural and habitual change. It will overcome the fragmentation of the mobility offer and the City of Turin will have the opportunity to consolidate intermodality and multimodality with a single ecosystem".
