Carol Schweiger: MaaS – Utopian Vision or Overpromised Boondoggle?

In the latest episode of Transit Voices, seasoned transit expert Carol Schweiger underscores the need for behavioral science insights to transform people’s commuting habits. “We need to bring in the behavioral scientists to help us understand how do we change people’s travel behavior,” she asserts, emphasizing that the Mobility as a Service (MaaS) proposition must rival the convenience of personal car usage.

 Carol shares her insights with Transit Voices host Ben Whitaker, delving into her extensive analysis of various international MaaS experiments. She observed, “There are many, many deployments that ended when the pilot project ended, there was no reason to keep them operating. The results were sketchy.”

Addressing earlier podcast guests’ critiques of MaaS as an overpromised and underdelivered service nominated for being the boondoggle in transit, Schweiger and Whitaker examine the potential of autonomous vehicles to revolutionize our dependence on private cars.

Carol posits, “If I can summon a vehicle, use that vehicle, and either have it go back to where it is needed, somewhere else by itself, or whatever, I think that is a utopian vision of where MaaS could go.”

This episode also shines a light on Schweiger’s personal motivations, positioning her as a unique figure in her field – a transit professional who had always dreamt of becoming one.   “Many of my colleagues ended up in public transit purely by accident,” she says. “But for me, it was actually planned. It started when I was around eight or nine years old. I was at my grandparents in Brooklyn who lived quite near a subway station, where there was a pedestrian-only bridge that went over the subway tracks.  I would literally spend hours standing on that bridge, watching the subways go in and out of that station, there was just something so fascinating about that when I was a little girl.”