Bounce has resumed its dockless scooter sharing services in Bengaluru and Hyderabad. They have also introduced flexible long term rental and subscription options called Bounce-A (Atmanirbhar) to enable seamless commute within cities. Currently, Bounce has rolled out a few hundred vehicles and they plan to introduce more scooters on the street in a batch-wise manner.
“With Bounce, people have easy access to an individual, safe and affordable scooter, enabling them to move while maintaining physical distancing. Within a week of resuming operations, we have done over 35,000 daily rides. As the lockdown gradually lifts and the economy opens up, we will see an uptake in self-driven shared mobility solutions,” the company said in a statement.
Vogo, an on-demand scooter & bike rental service provider, announced that it is resuming its operations in Bengaluru on Thursday. To ensure the safety of its customers, Vogo will home-deliver the sanitised bikes to those who are unable to pick them up from the docking stations. The company will be opening 50 additional docking stations in the city.
As part of this initiative, Vogo has also increased the rental duration of the two wheelers they are offering to customers so that they feel more relaxed about ownership of the vehicle they are using. The company is also distributing sanitisation kits to their customers which includes hand sanitiser, gloves, solutions to sanitise the bike and a cleaning cloth. People will also be able to extend the bike rental service online.
Rapido has also announced resumption of its bike taxi services in over 35 cities, following the new guidelines announced by the government for Lockdown 4.0. “For now, our bike taxi services will be operational in the green and orange zones as the services cannot be extended to the containment zones. Resuming these operations will bring relief to around 3L Captains (driver-partners) that are solely dependent on the bike taxi service for their daily income and livelihood. Additionally, we will keep updating our customers on the status of various cities and safety instructions via in-app notifications,” the company said in a statement.
Bike Taxi is a more open and personalised way for intra city travel, as opposed to other crowded alternate ways like cabs, buses, autos and trains, where the customer has an advantage of less exposure to any infection due to his/her limited interaction with the Captain, the company said.
For safety protocols, the Captains have been trained towards implementing safety checks and guidelines to follow before accepting rides to ensure customer safety, Rapido added.
As part of this exercise, Rapido has made it mandatory for its Captains:
> To install the Aarogya Setu app before they can go on-duty to start accepting orders
> To wear a mask at all times and carry sanitisers, hair net in addition to the mandatory helmets
> Captains are asked to maintain personal hygiene and sanitise their bikes at regular intervals. Especially sanitise the pillion seat before onboarding customers in addition to wearing a mask at all times
> Captains will also get a checklist of items and declaration that they have to adhere to before accepting rides. This will be done every time a Captain goes online
> Customers will get mandatory sanitised half helmets as opposed to full-face helmets before every ride