Ride-hailing platform has Ola announced the expansion of its Ola Bike service to 150 cities across the country, making it one of the dominant players in the micro-mobility space. However, the company has still not received the go-ahead for its pilot bike taxi service in its home market Bengaluru.
Earlier this year, Ola was piloting its bike taxi services here when the Karnataka Transport Department asked it to stop the services immediately as there is no provision yet to run the service in the State.
Ola Bike was first introduced in 2016 as a last-mile mobility solution in Gurugram, Faridabad and Jaipur. The company said popularity of the service amongst both bike-partners and customers encouraged it to introduce the category in various new markets — from metros such as Hyderabad, Chandigarh and Kolkata to small towns such as Gaya in Bihar, Bikaner in Rajasthan and Mughalsarai in Uttar Pradesh.
Arun Srinivas, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at Ola, said: “Ola Bike offers consumers a smart, innovative and affordable mobility solution; this is an offering that truly reflects our mission to build mobility for a billion people.”
Affordable mobility
“Ola Bike has enabled citizens from the smallest of towns such as Chapra in Bihar to large metropolitan areas such as Gurugram with access to quick, reliable and affordable mobility,” Srinivas added.
“Ola Bike is also helping build sustainable livelihoods for our fast-growing network of around close to 3,00,000 partners from within these ecosystems of cities and towns, creating opportunities like never before for the youth of the nation. We aim to impact over a million Bike-partners in the coming year.”
The company plans to scale up its presence and introduce the Ola Bike category in hundreds of new towns and cities over the next 12 months.
With its expansion into more towns and cities across India, Ola Bike has also opened up new employment avenues for potential Bike-partners. Across its various mobility offerings, Ola hosts the largest network of over 2 million driver-partners ensuring a regular source of income for them.
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