MaaS Adoption and Sustainability for Systematic Trips: Estimation of Environmental Impacts in a Medium-Sized City

Mobility as a Service (MaaS) is often seen as a promising solution to address societal and environmental challenges. Despite the importance of quantifying its potential benefits, few previous works have focused on the impacts on the environment, and all of them considered large cities. This study aims to forecast the diffusion of MaaS in a medium-sized city and quantify the consequent reduction in pollutant emissions for commuting trips. Answers from a mobility survey administered to employees of the Municipality of Padua (Italy) were used to calibrate a model predicting MaaS adoption, which was applied to real working trips to estimate daily vehicle emissions savings in future scenarios with different MaaS bundles. The results indicated that the opportunity to have multimodal mobility options providing door-to-door travel is a fundamental element to ensure wide MaaS diffusion. Furthermore, public transport was confirmed to be the backbone of such a system. Compared to the current scenario, we observed up to a 41% reduction in pollutant emissions. The analysis pointed out that MaaS adoption is highly dependent on the characteristics of the proposed bundles, thus highlighting the importance of a proper design of the service and ex ante evaluation of emission savings.