Over the last 15 years, digital mobility platforms for ride hailing like Uber, bike sharing like Beryl, e-scooter rental like Lime and journey planning apps like Citymapper have become common in urban societies. They are often seen as ‘disrupting’ the organisation of existing public transport systems and creating competition. In this article from our On Infrastructure publication, Professor Michael Hodson, Professor Andrew McMeekin and Dr Andrew Lockhart examine how these platforms can be strategically incorporated into existing systems by public authorities aiming to address public policy priorities and improve systems.

• Passenger transport authorities in metropolitan areas need to assume strategic control over platformised city-regional transport systems to deliver on public policy goals.
• To do so, they need properly devolved powers and the opportunity to steer the development of a platformised city-regional transport system.
• Strategy development across transport services and their supporting infrastructure in crucial – and can also address sustainability challenges, especially in accelerating the shift away from personal car use.

The remaking of metropolitan public transport systems

City-regions globally face a variety of sustainability challenges. These include improving the quality of life of their residents by addressing carbon emissions and poor air quality, while also achieving long-term economic growth. In this context, how to organise the transport infrastructure supporting the movement of people and goods into, around, and out of metropolitan areas, has become a pressing concern.

Responding to this challenge, digital mobility technology has become widespread, offering a variety of ways of moving around urban areas and multiple new mobility services, including mapping and system-wide mobility-as-a-service platforms.

Established bus, tram and rail transport operators have also incorporated digital technologies into their provision. These services are usually accessed by users and passengers on their mobile phones or devices.

Platformised city-regional public transport in England – development and future

The digitalisation of existing metropolitan transport systems is shaped by social interests as well as by technology. As part of our research into how digital platforms are reshaping urban mobility systems, sociotechnical analysis has demonstrated three ways of platformising existing metropolitan public transport systems.

Firstly, in the years following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and fuelled by venture capital, privately owned ride-hailing and micro-mobility platforms sought to ‘land’ their services in urban areas.

These services sought to expand their area of operation by building networks of users. The operation of digital mobility platforms, as conventionally understood, saw asset-light private companies offer ‘new’ mobility services, which relied on the repurposing of existing assets in tandem with the use of platform technologies.

Cities and urban contexts became primary sites in which dozens of such platforms operated. Yet, many of these have been fleeting in their presence, as was demonstrated by Mobike’s bike-sharing service in Greater Manchester. The variety and volatility of platforms poses problems for how they are coordinated and integrated with existing public transport systems.

Secondly, partly as a response to the problem of coordination and integration, private companies, such as MaaS Global, Citymapper, Moovit, Uber and Google have experimented with attempts to use technology to build new mobility service systems. Controlled by private, profit-seeking platform companies, these systems seek to integrate existing public and private transport services. This means that control of the system shifts towards the company and away from public transport authorities.

Thirdly, in recent years, public transport authorities have recognised that they need to take a more strategic approach to controlling public transport. They must explore how digital technology can re-make metropolitan transport systems. In order to meet sustainability challenges and other public priorities, metropolitan transport authorities are experimenting with how platformisation can support public transport provision at city-regional scale and allow them to gain greater control over the operation of public transport systems. This development is most advanced in the West Midlands, with a publicly funded, publicly controlled Mobility as a Service (MaaS) initiative, due to launch in 2024.

Towards strategic city-regional platformisation

Digital systems and existing transport systems can be organised in different ways but policymakers and public bodies must navigate the tension between contributing to public policy goals and creating new markets and commercial opportunities for private platform providers.

Given this dilemma, there is a need for bodies such as the UK Department for Transport (DfT) to develop a clear position in response. This is particularly important given the multi-billion-pound allocations, through City Region Sustainable Transport Settlements (CRSTS) and other public funding streams, that DfT has devolved to the public transformation of transport systems at city-regional scale.

Control, organisation and infrastructure

In a highly complex system of operators and infrastructures, the key strategic issue from a public authority perspective is how to integrate these in line with public policy goals.

Establishing who controls platforms has profound implications at city-regional scale, where transport authorities must consider how the public good is best served by the opportunities they provide. Strategy at this scale needs to decide how platforms and the existing transport system should be organised and which transport services, infrastructures and sources of data should be under public control. This clearly requires a framework to support challenging and ongoing conversations on this issue within combined authorities and transport authorities, and with national government.

Our framework – the Urban Digital Stack

We have drawn on our research in this area to develop a framework and resources to support officials with this. This framework can help urban policymakers and decision makers in considering key challenges and developing strategies. The concept of the Urban Digital Stack is to provide a multi-layer framework for urban policymakers to think about how multiple platforms should be organised in relation to existing urban public transport systems.

Looking at how multiple platforms can be shaped and organised by existing urban decision makers and public transport systems, we focus on how platforms can add to the existing landscape of urban public transport systems. The tool explores what social and political challenges this raises for the control of existing and digital forms of infrastructure, and implications for the organisation and ownership of data.

The Stack does not provide simple prescriptions. Its purpose is to help urban policymakers and decision makers to think about and to debate key challenges and questions with colleagues and other stakeholders and to support them in developing strategies and plans for responding to the challenge of digital mobility platforms. It can be used to communicate strategy in policy documents or presentations.

Building capability – no simple answers

There is no simple prescription or route map for how the platformisation of transport systems at the scale of city-regions should unfold – and what role public authorities will have in this.

Building capability at city-regional scale is an ongoing challenge. National government should support the long-term funding of transport bodies. They must also create properly devolved powers and allow them the power to develop a platformised city-regional transport system.

Application of the Urban Stack is one tool that could be used to apply lessons more widely as part of Department for Transport best practice.