NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – U.S.-based Cubic Transportation Systems and Israel-based trip planning app provider Moovit, now owned by Intel, have expanded their partnership to develop mobile services for transit agencies, seeking to enable transit customers to “look, book and pay” for multimodal journeys.
While the partnership is being pitched as one that would enable transit agencies to roll out Mobility-as-a-Service, or MaaS, apps, that could prove difficult. True MaaS rollouts–which allow users to plan, book and pay for multimodal transit in one app or platform–have so far failed to take off. That’s in part because commercial agreements and integration with third-party mobility providers, such as ride-hailing services or bike and scooter rental companies, are not easy to accomplish.
The Cubic-Moovit agreement appears to focus mainly on enabling Cubic to provide a more attractive white-label mobile apps to its transit agency customers, combining Moovit’s trip-planning platform and huge transit data repository with Cubic’s fare collection and payments expertise, along with its account-based ticketing back office technology and its real-time vehicle and passenger data.
