Dive Brief:
- The city of Tampa, Florida, announced Monday it’s piloting a mobility-as-a-service app aimed at helping residents coordinate and pay for public transit and move throughout the city.
- The app from the company Moovit will help users plan multimodal trips, including walking, biking, scootering, driving, and riding the streetcar or bus. It will also provide mobility ticketing for public transit, real-time transit arrival information, and show the location of parking lots and park-and-rides, among other urban mobility information, the city stated.
- While the app is available to everyone, 200 people will participate in the pilot. They will be required to answer three-question surveys in 30-day intervals over a six-month period. “The cost of travel, both financial and time cost, is going up across Tampa Bay,” said Tampa Mobility Director Vik Bhide in a statement. “With the Moovit app, the City of Tampa is trying to make it as easy as possible to get people where they need or want to go.”
Dive Insight:
MaaS is a tool that cities can use to help move people and ease congestion. For instance, Pittsburgh in 2021 launched a MaaS platform that offered access to public transit and shared mobility services to make universal basic mobility accessible to low-income residents.
The Moovit app will provide suggested routes for how users can get to their intended destination most conveniently. The trip planner includes shared electric bikes and scooters, street cars, ride-hailing services, personal vehicles and bicycles, the city stated in its announcement.
“What makes Moovit different is that it offers a complete plan, pay, ride experience and provides everything a user needs to get around more easily,” Moovit Chief Growth and Marketing Officer Yovav Meydad said in the press release.
