Barriers to the adoption of the mobility-as-a-service concept: the case of Istanbul, a large emerging metropolis

Megatrends such as urbanization, digitalization, and decarbonization have created the necessity for new and creative approaches to the urban transportation system. As a solution to the problems of the increasingly digitalized urban transportation environment, “Mobility-as-a-Service” (MaaS) was proposed as a new sustainable transportation concept in Helsinki in 2014. With the use of the MaaS concept, residents of a large emerging metropolis, such as Istanbul, Turkey, can be offered a fast, efficient, environment-friendly, and inexpensive way of travel. However, despite the significant benefits of MaaS, there are several factors that can hinder the adoption of MaaS. This paper aims to analyze these barriers and their contextual relationships with each other using Total Interpretive Structural Modeling (TISM) and Matrix-based-Multiplication-Applied-to-a-Classification (MICMAC) methods. The case study has been conducted on an expert group to explore which significant barriers might be encountered during the adoption of a MaaS system in Istanbul. This study also addresses how these barriers should be overcome, and the MaaS concept should be adopted in Istanbul. The results showed that the most significant barrier to adopting the MaaS concept in Istanbul are Laws, Regulations, and Guidelines that primarily include the legal nature of this mobility service. The least important barriers are found to be Customer Acceptance and Labor Shortage. Therefore, the case study results provided a unique perspective for emerging countries in terms of barriers to successful MaaS implementations and revealed significant differences from the developed countries.