Intertraffic Q&A: Sampo Hietanen talks smart mobility and, of course, MaaS

Smart mobility is a multifaceted beast that despite evolving exponentially over the last decade and a half, has stayed resolutely true to its underlying principles. Intertraffic interrupted Mobility as a Service pioneer Sampo Hietanen’s family skiing holiday to find out what’s driving the industry... and him.

Intertraffic: When Mobility as a Service first came to everyone’s attention in the early 2010s, one of its unique selling points was that it was inclusive of isolated communities, places that have maybe one bus a day.  Over the years that important element seems to have fallen away a bit, as if the smart mobility sector didn't seem to grasp how important it was. Would you agree?

Sampo Hietanen: Yes… and no. How I see it is, MaaS has a very good chance of providing market-based services to allow inclusivity in a much better way than the system does. Now, the problem with many inclusive mobility platforms, is the cost. In Finland alone, just a socially funded transport is €1.2 billion for 5 million people, and the cost grows every year. The problem is that eventually you'll start dropping on the service level. How MaaS can help in this is that if you have services in the market that are based on people not owning their own cars, then you might just end up giving them much more choice. The trick of this is, at first you have to have these services in the market, and then you can actually get on to a much more socially inclusive model, having a variety of different services for different types of people that cannot, for example, own or have their own car.

Smart Mobility solutions need to work in rural locations…

“How MaaS can help is that if you have services in the market that are based on people not owning their own cars, then you might just end up giving them much more choice”

Intertraffic: MaaS is, of course, still going strong, but it’s not unfair to say that it hasn’t quite grabbed the public with the vigour the likes of yourself were hoping for. What do you attribute that to?

SH: The common misconception was that MaaS is a very good concept, so let's make it solve all the issues we've had for the last 100 years that we've not been able to solve before. This was the wrong approach, because then you have a completely new concept and you say, “Let’s go and solve the issues in small villages for elderly people.” And then you can come to Tokyo. You need to create and allow the markets to hit the critical mass and then you can actually start utilizing it differently. There's two sides to the story.

…and in urban sprawls

Intertraffic: So in terms of new innovations, new solutions in the Smart Mobility sector, do you see social inclusion as being part of any new solutions, or is it still under the radar?

SH: It’s at the centre of many new innovations. Having said that, I'll take the example of elderly people going shopping. It makes all the sense in the world for society that people are much more mobile, even if they cannot drive. Now, the problem with this has been that the traffic flows of just these socially funded or publicly funded trips, is too small for integrating so you don't make them efficient enough. I think that there's a lot of lot of good innovations in social inclusion, but the best ones would be when you actually do not separate those innovations from the rest of the world, so that it becomes an integral part of everything.

“I think that there's a lot of lot of good innovations in social inclusion, but the best ones would be when you actually do not separate those innovations from the rest of the world”

Elderly members of our communities must not be underserved by the likes of Mobility as a Service platforms

Intertraffic: Are there companies doing this now that you could name?

SH: I’d say what Flock Mobility are doing enables exactly this, if it was used in an even more efficient way than they're doing now. Achieving more social inclusion has to be efficient and the trick for that is that you somehow combine private markets with publicly funded markets and with business funded trips and they can all live within the same service, then you're really onto something. This is pretty much what Flock are doing.

Intertraffic: So in terms of smart mobility, and as someone seen as one of the pioneers of one its “substrata”, what does Smart Mobility mean to you? How do you define it?

SH: To me, that means using technology so that I can be dumb. No technology should exist or actually can exist, just for the fun of it. The biggest problem seems to be that we just don't have the use cases. First we need to come up with, what do we want? How can we be lazier? And can technology give us that? Here’s an analogy: Emperor Nero was a brilliant Smart City innovator, because he set the whole city on fire. The fire is nothing. It's OK because we can actually cook our meat - that's the innovation. And this is what sometimes is lacking.  I love being dumb and lazy.

”To me, that means using technology so that I can be dumb. No technology should exist or actually can exist, just for the fun of it”

Intertraffic: You quite recently founded a new company, Aspectu. Can you tell us a bit more about the venture?

SH: As you know, I became something of a free man after my MaaS endeavours. Aspectu is Latin, and means something like having a look. And I thought that after a decade or more of trying to change how people think about mobility and create a new product category in mobility, and even say that it could even be better than owning a car, that I should look at what I’ve done and where I've been. 

I was happy enough that I got a lot of different experiences, good and bad. And after that, I got a lot of requests from companies, cities and governments to help with their strategy.