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Shuttl, the bus aggregating platform, has started crowd-sourcing to identify routes having high demand, and accordingly run buses. It identifies bus routes that have high demand and makes passengers pledge at least ten days of travel. Only if there are enough people does it launch a service. The company has been running such services since the last one month.
“The bar for starting services on a route is very low. We can start a route fast if we are assured of demand. So, we ask people to define their home and office locations. We make users pledge ten days subscription-based usage,” Amit Singh, co-founder of Shuttl, told BusinessLine .
The move allows Shuttl to lock passengers to its services.
Incidentally, it is not just bus aggregators that run services on routes discovered through crowd-sourcing. The French Railways, SNCF, also runs services based on crowd-sourcing.
“We have also experimented with train-on-demand. We put a train at a particular hour between two places. But we say, the deal is, if enough people are not buying tickets by a certain pre-determined time, we will not be running the service,” Diego Diaz, Director (International), SNCF Group, told BusinessLine during his visit.
SNCF has run such services on 100-200 km distances between cities, which is a long distance by French standards, Diaz said. He, however, added that such “shared trains” or “crowd-sourced trains” are yet to catch up.
SNCF, which has an incubator through which it funds start-ups, said such start-ups have developed apps on which customers share whether a train is busy and accordingly wait for the next train.
SNCF operates high-speed trains, inter-city trains, metros, buses, bikes, parking. It even acquired “Ouicar” in 2015. Ouicar is a car-sharing company that allows peer-to-peer rental, with 25,000 private cars. The move comes as public transportation shifts towards personalised shared mobility.
On whether Ouicar could cannibalise SNCF’s train services, Diaz said people travel using various mobility options, which are available.
While some people shift from trains to shared cars or shared buses, they can opt for those modes of transport, irrespective of whether SNCF offers such service or not.
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