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The MaaS Alliance is organising two high-level panel sessions during the Intertraffic Amsterdam 2026 Summit, focusing on the creation of a mobility ecosystem and the notion of public-private sector trust. Roelof Hellemans, Secretary General of the MaaS Alliance, explains the sessions’ overarching aims.

Intertraffic: If I am a member of the audience listening to these two panel sessions and I have a vested interest in creating a mobility ecosystem, or being a part of one, what will I be able to do with the information that I take away?

Roelof Hellemans (RH): It’s funny you should ask that because it's the same thing I'm always asking myself! As far as the Public Mobility: Orchestrating the Public Domain panel session is concerned, whether we’re talking about an open mobility ecosystem or the pan-European mobility framework or the marketplace for mobility… it's all the same meaning. What’s important is how we collaborate and what can the private and public sectors do to make sure they can influence mobility accessibility to take it one step back. How can a public authority really influence the way that people can move, can live, can stay in a town, city, region, or how they travel? So, we are talking about how to connect a public transport authority to a public transport operator. How do we connect on a multiple way, meaning all modes are accessible to booking, to payments, and to settlements. How do we exchange the information to make sure that we're doing the right thing?

Intertraffic: It sounds as though the sessions will be a mix of local authority transport and local authority politics.

RH: It's close to political because we are able to connect to all mobility service providers, to all public transport operators. It's not the technology that is holding us back, it's the political entities to make sure that they are enabling us to play with mobility propositions. This is why it's all about open mobility ecosystem, meaning it’s  also a big issue in the UK, in Luxembourg, in Belgium, in Germany. Let's frame it as ‘the left wing wants free public transport for everybody’. We agree! That's great bu it doesn’t exist. So if you want to say it's free, then we need to make sure it's covered by public services, meaning our taxpayers are still paying for it. Or do we want to make sure there is an optimization of all options offered to all people moving, working or staying in an area?

Intertraffic: In terms of the panels themselves, can you tell us who will be participating?

RH: For one of the panels, we have two speakers confirmed and I'm still waiting for the third one. We have Kasper de Jonge from the Rijkswaterstaat – it’s said that we have a broken public transport system and we need to fix it to make it truly public mobility and optimize it. We also have Geert Kloppenburg, a well-known expert on public mobility. We’ll be asking what do you want to get out of it? How do you want to play? How do you want to orchestrate? How do you want to influence behaviour? What kind of propositions do you offer? What tools can we provide the public to make sure they can play with the tools to offer to the audience they are facilitating? Genuinely I could fill all four days of Intertraffic with discussions about this subject, but we will try to compress it into three quarters of an hour.

Intertraffic: So, how do you prioritize what to talk about in those 45 minutes so the audience goes away with ideas of how to make their own changes or implement their own ideas?

RH: Our focus will be on the political entities with the message being “You can do better with less money because there is no money and you need to improve because there is no optimization. In the Netherlands we are doing this for one small island in a small province in a very small project, but the impact is huge. If we can do it on the small island, it means we don't have a concession and can also add public cars as well in an orchestration of mobility, so the amount of supply is going to be real-time instead of fixed. We will do it by talking and by pointing out where we are now and where we want to head for. We can’t keep doing the same thing over and over

Intertraffic: As for your other panel discussion, that has a different focus. Can you tell us about that?

RH: The second panel is about public-private trust. This will be a open discussion with the audience in which we will first establish which sector they are from and then using online tools we will ask people who are in the audience what is your experience of this framework? And you will see that there is a huge differentiation between what public thinks and what private thinks.

And we will align the differences between both perceptions in real-time, on stage. If you think that you have done a great job, then how come the private sector is looking at things completely different to the public sector? Once you log in you will identify yourself as public or private and then we can ask the questions and we will identify the results and move forward with another question on those kinds of topics. The concept of trust sounds simple, but it's very hard to understand what trust is and that's what we want to point out. Why don't we understand each other and why don't we trust each other? There’s a lack of trust.

Building Trust in the Mobility Ecosystem: Aligning Public and Private Expectations takes place on Wednesday 11 March in Summit Theatre 1 at 16:15

Public Mobility: Orchestrating the Public Domain takes place on Thursday 12 March in Summit Theatre 2 at 14:30