Ultimately MaaS requires the effective co-ordination of Government and private parties. When thinking about MaaS, it is important to consider Government as wearing "two hats". First, no matter what MaaS solution is ultimately adopted, Government will always perform the function of regulating MaaS providers and the transportation industry more generally. Second, in addition to acting as the regulator of MaaS, Government might play a role (depending on the level of involvement) in the provision of the MaaS services to customers.

Government as regulator

From a regulation perspective, there are two fundamental considerations:

• Accreditation: At the core of any MaaS service is high capacity public transport (such as rail) which is generally provided and regulated by Government entities. For this reason, MaaS accreditation is concerned with implementing a legislative framework to provide for MaaS providers to be approved by the Government and "accredited", giving them the right to provide the MaaS service to customers and the legal authority to collect a fee (whether it is a monthly subscription fee or on a pay-as-you-go basis) on behalf of the transport providers from customers.

By having an accreditation process, Government is able to do due diligence on the MaaS providers to satisfy itself that the MaaS provider can competently and safely provide the MaaS service to customers. While the form of MaaS accreditation will be new and will need to be considered by Government, the concept of transportation accreditation is not.

• Privacy: MaaS requires seamless data sharing between the customer, MaaS provider, any data collecting intermediary and the actual transportation providers. Due to the importance of this issue, we will consider privacy and related issues in a separate follow on update.

Other Government involvement in MaaS

Facilitator - infrastructure

As a minimum, Government will usually act as a facilitator of MaaS by investing in the supporting infrastructure required to enable MaaS, including:

• New transport infrastructure such as mass transit systems which will become the "backbone" of MaaS
• New smart infrastructure such as telematics systems on buses and rollingstock
• Ticketing solutions
• Interchanges such as bicycle stations, scooter parking and ride sharing pick up points at public transportation interchanges.

Facilitator - Frameworks

Government can also facilitate MaaS by helping set the standards or framework which will ultimately need to be adopted by all parties in the MaaS process to allow different forms of transportation to talk to each other in real time, and then feed into the user facing application.

An example of a Government-facilitated standard is the Transport for NSW (TfNSW) MaaS Data Sharing Specification which has been developed by TfNSW for transport operators in the MaaS ecosystem for the sharing of planned and real time information, including capacity information.

Data broker

Government can play a role as data broker. In this capacity, Government acts as data intermediary between the different providers and the MaaS provider (who has the interface with the customer).

This may be particularly efficient for Government who, as a provider of core mass transit services such as rail, will often be providing large amounts of data to the MaaS provider anyway.

Acting as a data intermediary could foster increased competition and help reduce any market barriers to entry by ensuring that any potential MaaS provider able to obtain Government accreditation would have access to the same information.

What should we hope for from Government today?

Moving to MaaS is a challenge but there are some fundamental steps for Government can adopt to smooth the development pathway:

• consider the appropriate regulatory framework to apply to MaaS, including whether amendments to existing legislation are required to address issues such as accreditation
• invest in appropriate and appropriately specified supporting infrastructure projects (including both hard infrastructure and smart infrastructure, such as telematics systems on buses and rollingstock that are sufficient to support MaaS) and transport interchanges;
• invest in new generation ticketing solutions which are required to support MaaS rollout (and ensuring these solutions can be used in a MaaS environment); and
• consult with industry, to develop standard frameworks regulating the distribution of payments, data sharing, liability and insurance.