Plans by Transport for New South Wales, Australia’s largest transit agency, to launch a trial enabling users to plan, book and pay for multimodal rides is the next step toward the agency’s long-term goal of building a full mobility-as-a-service, or MaaS, platform.
The scheduled MaaS trial, which will offer users “multimodal subscription-style” bundled services from both public and private mobility providers, is set to launch early next year.
It comes as Transport for NSW wraps up its one-year pilot that put a digital version of its closed-loop Opal card into NFC mobile wallets connected with such Pays services as Apple Pay and Samsung Pay. The agency said this week it recorded more than 300,000 trips paid for with digital Opal over the previous 12 months.