The Quest for Seamless Mobility: Completing the Puzzle - Part I

“In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.”

— Isaac Asimov

The concept of seamless mobility has been an unfulfilled promise for decades: today’s travelers are stuck in the “app jungle”, where they have to book separate parts of their trips via different apps and platforms. How is it possible, despite the tremendous technological change of the past decades, that we still can’t book an entire trip with the push of a button? Our analysis (which we will publish in three parts) explores the challenges that contenders for seamless mobility need to overcome in order to be successful. We also show that the solution lies in creating the so-called “communication meta-layer” (utilizing blockchain technology), which has the potential to transform the entire industry .

Dream within a dream

“Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it, therefore, the less gone? All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”

– Edgar Allan Poe: A Dream Within a Dream

In the past few decades, innovative companies and prophets of disruption have envisioned the future of mobility, where travelers can get almost immediately from Podgorica to Antananarivo by pushing a button.

The idea of seamless mobility, where different transportation systems work together like delicate ballet dancers abiding the instructions of an invisible conductor, has inspired tons of studies.

These accounts envision glittering smart cities, with swarms of self-driving cars carrying millions of people to their destination in the blink of an eye, while levitating trains swoop by far above the highways, transporting crowds of rosy-faced citizens of the future.

The only thing such accounts have left out is the DeLorean of Professor Emmett Brown, probably because it would appear to be almost obsolete in front of such magnificent scenery.

Imagination easily takes us into a place, where new dreams are born within existing ones and we lose complete touch with reality. In the case of mobility, visionaries often mix futuristic technologies with existing ones, while somehow all the tools and services work together in the celestial harmony of a brave new world.

It is true that we, humans often gain inspiration from tales and idealistic visions. In the end, visions can give us the motivation boost to embark on exciting new ventures. However, most contenders have no clue where to start, turning vision into hallucination. People simply travel and don’t give much of a thought to overarching concepts.

In fact, the word mobility means “the quality or state of being mobile or movable”: and if people move, they would like to do it as conveniently as possible.

So far, technological advancement has made huge strides in carrying people to any part of the globe in a (relatively) comfortable and speedy way. Still, being insatiable is part of human nature: once we get used to a certain level of service, we demand more.

How is it possible that, despite the remarkable technological advancement of the half-century, there is no sight of the above-mentioned Wunderland? How is it possible, that in the age of the Internet-based economy, we often still need to print a train ticket (then get a hefty fine if we lose it) or check-in separately for each flight, providing the same data all over and over again? Is something fundamentally important missing? How come that mobility providers (the companies that transport people from A to B) have not jumped en masse on the idea of seamless mobility?

 “Vision without execution is just hallucination”

– The quote is attributed both to Henry Ford and Thomas Edison

Travails of travelers

Sweat and tears: the pain of mobility

Close your eyes and imagine you are about to embark on a long journey! Say, you booked a trip to Antananarivo. You nervously call a cab to pick you up from your home (you hate flying, of course).

As traffic seems to be dense, you tell the cab driver to bring you right away to the railway station, where you will take the airport express train. As you are running out of your mobile internet allotment, you can’t buy the train ticket on your phone: as you arrive at the station, you need to queue in front of a ticket machine.

Once you finally reach the airport, you go through a cumbersome and stressful check-in process. If all goes well, you will finally board the plane and fly off to your destination. If it is on a distant continent, you will most likely change flights a couple of times. And once you land in the city of your dreams, your hotel happens to be on the other side of town. Good luck!

If you are a traveler, you have probably already experienced a similar reality: you not only need to take care of organizing and aligning different parts of your trip separately but also bear the consequences if fate throws a monkey wrench in the works.

If you miss the plane, your whole trip is likely to collapse and you will have to re-organize the scattered pieces all over again at a considerable cost not only in time, but also in money. With the words of Winston Churchill, traveling today almost comes with “blood, toil, tears and sweat” - luckily, mostly without the bloody part.

Welcome to the app-jungle

What is the source of this pain?

Why is that, despite all the efforts of companies to make their customers happy, that travelers feel slightly roughed up at the end of their journey?

The reason is that the respective domain of each company defines and limits the business they operate in: companies focus on optimizing their service offering within their slice of the cake. Transportation systems (e.g., taxis, public transport, car-sharing, airplane) de facto operate in separate silos, offering their own service bundles to customers.

Take a look at your phone: you will have different apps for calling a Uber-taxi, a regular cab, booking a train ticket, or buying a day-pass for public transport.

Travelers today are tangled up in the “app- jungle”: as you can access different methods of transportation via separate applications, you need to organize your trip piece by piece, carefully fitting all the shreds together. You can’t really change any part of the chain without having to re-organize the entire journey.

Even though certain types of travel resources are abundantly available, excess capacities often remain unused: just think about the empty seats in cars or taxis, the wasteland of empty parking lots, or midnight buses running without passengers. In a nutshell (and economist-talk), we use existing resources inefficiently.

The result is higher traffic congestion, pollution and related costs (fuel, parking, paying for sitting in the traffic jam in a cab, etc.). Annoying duplications (just think about how frustrating it is to type in the same data all over and over again in different platforms) cause further headache to millions of travelers every year.

The patchwork of fragmented mobility results in a waste of time, money, and assets.

Mobility service providers also suffer, as most of them operate in mature markets with low margins, where both acquisitions of new customers and differentiation from competitors are extremely difficult.

New market entrants face almost insurmountable barriers. At first sight, the world of mobility seems like a land of zero-sum games rather than a cordial invitation for lucrative cooperation. Even though the

business instinct might tell providers to broaden their service portfolio and look for untapped synergies, it is not obvious how to start.

If turned into reality, seamless mobility shall cut the “app jungle” and offer the possibility for mobility providers to free up their locked-up potential and offer integrated services, in cooperation with other companies.

There have been countless examples for attempts to put together the scattered pieces of the “mobility puzzle”.

The idea itself is not even new: the discussion around common public transportation standards is at least twenty years old, with notable examples promoted by local governments in Germany.

Even the European Union supports the project of creating a continent-wide seamless mobility network (Maas4EU) in the framework of the Horizon 2020 program. Apart from policymakers, scores of daring start-ups and mature corporations have embarked on to resolve the problem of fragmentation.

If the pain is so widely felt and there have been numerous attempts to solve it, how come that the solution is (seemingly) so far away?