Bengaluru: 40% Uber ride requests unfulfilled during peak traffic

Over 40 per cent rides requested by commuters during rush hours in Bengaluru, go unfulfilled according to calculations by Uber’s data science team. This was higher than any other city in India. A distant second Hyderabad had an 80 per cent rate of fulfilling ride requests.  

While Bangalore is famed for poor traffic management, Uber blamed the Karnataka government for de-incentivizing its drivers with poor policies. The cab service runs on a flexible demand-supply based pricing model, varying according to traffic, cab availability, rider demand, etc.

However, Karnataka government has disallowed the app based service to charge riders more than 2X surge as well as duration based fares.

Talking to reporters Head of Uber India and South Asia Prabhjeet Singh, elaborated upon this allegation saying, “For a vehicle in Karnataka which costs Rs 5-10 lakh which is the bulk of the fleet, riders can’t be charged more than Rs 24/ km + GST. Second, there can’t be any time component as well. From a driver’s side, there is lower motivation to drive during the peak hours as there is more fuel expenditure and more time spent but not getting compensated adequately.”

“So, for example, for a 4-km ride Uber cannot charge more than Rs 100 even when the customer may be willing to pay. This results in an average 15-18 per cent lower income for a driver in Bengaluru compared to any other driver doing the same hours of work in any other city. On top of that, the cost of operations in Bengaluru is much higher due to the low availability of CNG infrastructure in the city compared to others,” he added.  

Wait times for taxis in Bengaluru has increased to upto 15-20 minutes, and carpooling in the city has also been banned. However, reports have shown that aggregators continue to do so illegally.

Meanwhile, commuters have moved to other modes of transport as prices and wait times continued to increase.