Five years of pilots, one national platform and one question still unanswered
Nearly 950,000 trips completed, an average of over 16 per user, PNRR targets exceeded. These are the figures for MaaS for Italy as of 31 May 2026, five years after the launch of the programme that brought the Mobility as a Service model to Italian cities and regions for the first time on a national scale. The white paper just published by the Department for Digital Transformation offers a full account of the experience.
The scale of the pilot was substantial: six municipalities (Bari, Florence, Milan, Naples, Rome, Turin), six regions and one autonomous province, 14 MaaS Operator applications, a total budget of €56.9 million funded through the PNRR and the National Complementary Investment Plan. Participants across Italy could plan, book and pay for multimodal journeys on a single platform, combining public transport, taxis, shared mobility and parking.
The infrastructure nobody talks about
The detail most likely to be overlooked is also the one with the longest shelf life. At the heart of the programme sits the Data and Services Repository for MaaS (DSRM), the national platform that collects static and dynamic data from local transport services and makes them available to operators according to the European standards NeTEx and SIRI. Active since 2023, it allows any MaaS Operator to access a single point of entry rather than negotiating separately with dozens of transport companies, each with their own data formats and interfaces. Before the DSRM, that fragmentation made the market practically inaccessible to smaller operators.
The white paper describes this infrastructure as the digital equivalent of roads and rail: public administration does not run the services, it guarantees everyone equal access to the data. The platform will remain operational beyond the pilot phase, and it is one of the most concrete legacies the programme leaves behind.
When the laboratory is the city itself
Alongside the territorial pilots, the programme activated two Living Labs in Milan and Turin. In Milan, the experiment focused on trolleybus lines 90-91, one of the city’s busiest routes: cameras, sensors and connected traffic lights communicate with vehicles in real time, optimising speed and stops. In Turin, the ToMove Living Lab brought Italy’s first driverless public transport service to the streets, the autonomous shuttle AuToMove, operating since October 2025 at the Campus Luigi Einaudi, alongside a last-mile delivery robot and a digital twin of the city.
Across the two labs: over 1,500 citizens involved, 54 researchers, 223 organisations, and €1.5 million in additional investment attracted.
The white paper does not shy away from what remains unresolved. The economic sustainability of MaaS Operators sits at the top of the list. Multimodal mobility apps operate on thin margins, and no credible self-sustaining business model has emerged yet. User demand is there. Public funding held the experiment together. Whether the market can hold it up on its own is the question the next phase will have to answer.
