The cab sharing model that eases woes of city's office-goers

Bengaluru: For most office-goers in the city the daily commute to office is a nightmare they have to put up with on a daily basis.

Fleet service provider Routematic, which entered the market five months ago, is based on an innovative idea of corporate commutation, where corporate employees of a business park can share commute with fellow commuters from the same locality.

Routematic Co-founder and CEO Surajit Das said, "While car pooling is good in concept, we believe that cab sharing is a more practical idea in the Indian context. What will push the needle in the commute market is not cost savings, but higher comfort at lower cost. A cab sharing facility provides that feature as it is a home pick/drop facility."

The current fleet size of Routematic in the city is 200. However, one of the major reasons transport experts cite to the problem of increasing traffic is the encouragement of the use of parking by private car owners.

"A parking space costs Rs 5,000-10,000 in any corporate business park. Since the cost of real estate is so high, the onus of discouraging private parking is on the companies. By using less parking spaces, corporates can save almost half of this money and devote it to more productive purposes," Das added.

The addition of cars operated by cab aggregators has led to long traffic snarls and the commuters often express displeasure at the delay in pick up and drop, and sometimes the request being cancelled by the cab drivers on app.

"This is a growing segment and a preferred mode of transportation, as commuters are unwilling to give up the comfort of home pick/drop over nodal pick/drops. The current aggregators are unable to pack the demand effectively through cab sharing. Therefore, commuters are mostly using single cabs," he opined. Often single user of cars are widely believed to be an impediment in the free commuting and contributing to the worsening of air quality in office areas. Das believes that corporates must extend commute services to employees and also provide incentives to employees for using local transport and shuttle service to the nearest metro stop can be made free.

If the corporates streamline commuting, Routematic believes that the move would help reduce carbon footprint.

"Corporates that provide shared cabs to employees can significantly lower the number of cars on roads. In fact, one car eliminated from the road reduces about two tonnes of Co2 emission a year. A fully occupied 4-seater cab can take away three additional cars from the road. It is easy for a corporate with over 1,000 employees to club employees coming from neighbouring localities into cabs. Therefore, an environment friendly corporate of about 1,000 employees can reduce over 4 tons of carbon emission every day. This would reduce traffic congestion and the corporate's overall carbon footprint," he says.

Paper-less advantage

The paperless billing process will not only be easy to track but it would ease the auditing and process data to generate analytics.

The automation of the employee transport system is different from other companies where for every 1,000 employees 1,500 pages of log sheets are printed every day.