Ola Bike Taxi Restarts In Bengaluru; Bhavish Aggarwal Plans To Start Service In Small Towns
Ola restarted their electric bike service in Bengaluru. Ola plans to scale up this service across India in the upcoming months.
Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal on Saturday revealed that they will be restarting Ola electric scooter in Bengaluru today, September 16, 2023. The electric bike taxi will be S1 Bike.
In a social media post, Aggarwal wrote, "Restarting Ola Bike in Blr today 🙂 This time, all electric and our own S1 scooters! ₹25 for 5km, ₹50 for 10km. Lowest cost, very comfortable and great for the environment! Will scale across India over next few months."
The Ola S1 bike will be priced at Rs 25 for 5km and Rs 50 for 10km. Aggarwal said that they will scale up this service across India in the upcoming months.
However, several state governments including Karnataka are thinking on a proposal to ban bike taxis.
In another tweet, Aggarwal said that ride hailing has been concentrated in top 15-20 cities so far. With electric bike taxis he wants to change that and go deeper into smaller towns. He also asked for reccomendations for starting Ola E bike taxi services in less than 1 lakh population town in Karnataka next week.
Ola services in Maharashtra?
In March 2023, ride-hailing service providers Ola and Uber had applied to the Maharashtra government for aggregator licences. Guidelines brought out by the Centre and the Maharashtra government mandate such app-based companies to obtain a licence. Currently, the government cannot efficiently take action in case of violations by these operators and a licence could change that situation.
In Maharashtra, app-based taxis and autos have been operational since 2014. The ride-hailing service firms have applied for aggregator licences at Mumbai’s Tardeo RTO, which has jurisdiction over the entire island city. The applications are under scrutiny and will be subsequently put up to the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Transport Authority (MMRTA) for a final decision about granting the licence.
In April 2022, MMRTA had granted provisional aggregator licences to ANI Technologies Pvt Ltd (Ola), Uber India Systems Pvt Ltd, Meru Mobility Tech Pvt Ltd, and Mahindra Logistics Ltd as per the Centre’s Motor Vehicle Aggregator Guidelines-2020.
