BENGALURU : The concept of bike taxis, while not new to the city, had seen a dip in the previous years with the Transport Department ruling that they are not legal. This resulted in the quick exit of global giants like Uber, who had entered the bike taxi business for a brief while. However, for smaller companies, which chose to weather the storm and restart operations, the results have been great.
This week, City Express caught up with Rapido, a bike taxi company that offers rides for as low as `3 per kilometer. Launched in Bengaluru in January 2016, Rapido evolved from the bike taxi model to adding package delivery to its list of services and now has around 30,000 people on board the platform as either passengers or ‘captains’.
In order to extend its reach to those who are visually impaired, the company now has introduced user-friendly measures. “Commuting in general is not easy for the visually-impaired. Visually-impaired users already registered on a caller-app, can just give us a missed call and we will automatically get their details," said Arvind Sanka, co-founder of Rapido. He also explained that the visually-impaired also have the ability to do a voice search and easily choose the area that they want to commute to. Currently there are more than 200 visually impaired customers on board the platform.
Speaking to City Express, Sanka said that the app had a fair share of women users as well, who felt perfectly safe while using the two wheelers. “The app is safe for women. We have 20% female customers. We ensure that only the top-rated rides/captains are allotted to the female customers. Moreover, we don’t accept female customers post 10pm to be on the safer side.” explained Arvind. People also have the option of rating the captain and even sending SOS in case of any issues.
Next in the plan is a ‘power pass’, which will provide cheaper travel at a subscription price to regular commuters. “We’re still working on the pass along with a feature called ‘rider score’, which will give a certain score to each rider that they can work to keep up, it’ll be based on whether they are rash drivers, whether they over-speed, etc,” said Arvind.
Bike taxis have had a roller-coaster ride with the Government since their inception and even now, the transport department stands by its viewpoint that these taxis are illegal. While the Government had proposed making these services legal becuase of the rising traffic woes of the city, the plan was put on the backburner. Speaking to City Express, Narendra Holkar, Joint Commissioner of Transport, said that he had not received any requests for a permit application from any of the bike-taxi companies. However, he declined to comment further.