Bridging Mobility Gap: Mobility as a Service Adoption Challenges for Work Trips in Emerging Economies

This study addresses a research gap in adopting Mobility as a Service (MaaS) in developing countries, focusing on work trips and shared mobility options. It comprehensively analyzes MaaS adoption using joint revealed and stated preference data, which has been underexplored in the existing literature. This study employs discrete choice models: the multinomial logit model under random utility maximization (RUM) and a random regret minimization framework (RRM), separately, along with error component logit with a RUM framework to investigate the effects of socioeconomic and travel characteristics on MaaS adoption in India. The findings reveal that lower-income individuals strongly prefer MaaS over private vehicles. Gender has an insignificant effect, in contrast to findings from developed nations. Travel time, travel cost, travel time reliability, waiting time, and number of transfers negatively affect MaaS adoption. A higher number of transfers, a higher waiting time, a higher travel time reliability, and a higher travel time have a significantly negative effect on MaaS adoption. This study further estimates the reliability ratio of 0.51 for work trips, emphasizing the significance of travel time in mode choice. These insights provide crucial policy implications for fostering inclusive MaaS systems in developing countries.