How do I want the city council to spend our budget? Conceiving MaaS from a citizen's perspective … (as well as biking infrastructure and public transport)

Abstract

While several governmental and research efforts are set upon mobility-as-a-service (MaaS), most of them are driven by individual travel behavior and potential usage. However, considering only individuals’ preferences carries the risk of neglecting societal benefits going beyond individual travel behavior. This study addresses the valuation of different features of MaaS-services from a social desirability perspective as compared to social investments in biking infrastructure and in public transport, and aims at eliciting trade-offs between different features of such projects. This analysis is conducted on the basis of Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE). In PVE-experiments, individuals select their preferred portfolio of government projects given a constrained public budget and societal preferences for (the impacts of) government projects can be determined based on these choices. The results show that the population of Rotterdam exhibits a willingness to allocate public resources to all types of investment projects considered in the analysis. However, the willingness to allocate resources to bike infrastructure projects and public transport seems to be higher than the willingness to dedicate resources to MaaS subsidies. Within the different types of MaaS subsidies considered, subsidies aimed at sustainability exhibit a larger social valuation. Strong negative synergies among similar projects exist, signalizing that individuals prefer diversifying the use of public resources across different types of investment projects.