CHENNAI:Mass transit aggregator app Ridlr, which has established its presence in Mumbai, plans to expand its digital ticketing service in southern cities. While the company already has information services in Chennai, Bengaluru, Bellary, Hyderabad, and Vijaywada, it plans to take the number to 25 cities with both information and e-ticket services by early next year.
These ventures work alongside public transport and see themselves as part of an integrated transport system. “When it comes to counterparts abroad, such services are initiated and owned by government transport agencies. But, public and private partnerships for infrastructure development are a tried-and-tested policy in the Indian economy, and Reliance Mumbai Metro is a glowing example of the same. In tune with that, we are only making the government’s vision of Digital India edge a step closer to reality,” said Brijraj Vaghani, founder and CEO of Ridlr. This would also help in attracting travellers towards city buses, which are already struggling due to mounting losses and disintegrating fleet.
The company brings mass transit information and transaction online for users by employing a multitude of technologies to solve commuting problems - from traditional databases to embedded systems programming on the hardware. “We also employ data analytic tools to understand user behaviour and the success of new features that we launch. These are run on the cloud, which enables us to scale up and down as needed,” said Vaghani.
From a user’s point of view, one can look up real-time traffic update and information, plan travel, recharge bus passes and pay for different modes of travel. “We already have over 1,75,000 people who have bought tickets from Ridlr and close to 10 per cent of the total pass holders have already recharged the pass at least once on Ridlr,” Vaghani said, adding the company aims to achieve a big share of the country’s overall mobile-ticketing market, which is around 100 million users per day.According to Vaghani, the highest usage is across the big metros as well as some of the smaller cities. “To tap the rural market, we plan to extend our new-age bus-ticketing services in rural regions in the next three months,” he added.