Europe, though, is becoming mature for multimodal travel. A well-developed railway infrastructure, a myriad of options for intra-continental flights, and a culture of mass transit utilisation gives travelers an extensive set of travel choices. Imagine you want to travel from Brussels to Vienna for a business conference. You could take two complementary options: a BRU-VIE flight, or a night train (which I personally prefer). And at the destination, you can take the CAT train to the city center – this is called a supplementary option. Now, imagine that, instead of purchasing your tickets separately for each operator or being locked to the options offered by your travel agent, the system lets you choose, modify and supplement travel services using an open market with all available providers participating – this consumer-centric approach is called Mobility as a Service (MaaS).
That is what true multimodality will look like.
Europe’s Flightpath 2050 vision requires that 90% of travellers within Europe are able to complete their journey, door-to-door within 4 hours. To achieve that, European institutions are putting major efforts into implementing a continent-wide MaaS framework to guarantee universal access, data transparency, seamless connectivity, and travel certainty. Skymantics is working on initiatives such as the CAMERA Coordination and Support Action, which formulates best practices for an integrated air and ground multimodal EU transport network.
The trick in making multimodality a thing, though, is integrated ticketing. The contract between the traveler and the transportation provider(s) needs to be the same from origin to destination. That translates necessarily into a sequence of linked tickets. The nature of this link, though, cannot be called multimodal until there is a contractual relationship (i.e. it defines who has the responsibility of a connection between tickets). In the air and rail industries, tickets are entitlements of a contractual nature and allows a ticket to be composed of connected segments. This is not the case for metropolitan transportation where the entitlement, fare media, and access system are conventionally associated with an infrastructure (think London Oyster card – everything is linked to a piece of plastic carrying funds, not to the promise to take a traveler to their destination).
And then, there is the problem of trust – how would an operator know what is happening elsewhere in the network? For this, predictability in the intermodal connections needs to be assured (e.g. the sequence of events happening between catching a train to Brussels airport and boarding the plane – strikes, delays and train holdings do happen).
Example of a connectivity graph. Nodes can be airports connected by airline routes, metropolitan transit networks, street grids, or even walkable spaces
Transit networks of any scale (city, region or worldwide) can be modeled as connectivity graphs composed of nodes (transport hubs such as stations and airport halls) and edges. When an event occurs in a point of the network, real-time data analytics running on graph nodes estimate behavioral trends, end-to-end transit times, and risk of disruption in the overall itinerary. This can be useful to trigger rebooking or application of insurance policy terms before events happen.
This approach can be followed to model the movements of virtually any type of traveler. It has been used by Skymantics to develop predictive models of airport terminal walking paths and urban street routes. Now, it is being used to assess modal choice and connectivity impacts into the capacity of European airports that affect demand sensitivity. These models can be used to shape interconnected air and ground mobility patterns, considering various scenarios of infrastructure, traveler demographics, and capacity limitations. Ultimately, the objective is to scale the effect of these events to forecast demand in the European transportation network, predict constraints in the network, and optimize the efficiency of itineraries offered to travelers as a multimodal service.
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