Economic growth, rapid urbanization and environmental concerns are driving the need for innovative mobility solutions across India, a country with well over a billion inhabitants. The country’s most popular mobile app for transportation has now revealed details on how its shared mobility products are making a significant contribution toward reducing vehicular pollution and addressing traffic congestion in cities across India.
Founded in Jan 2011 by IIT Bombay (Indian Institute of Technology) alumni, Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati, Ola integrates city transportation for customers and driver partners onto a mobile technology platform, ensuring convenient, transparent and quick service fulfillment. Using the Ola mobile app, users across 102 cities can book from over 350,000 cabs and 100,000 auto-rickshaws and taxis. Ola has also introduced a range of shared mobility services on its platform, such as Ola Shuttle for commuting, and Ola Share for ride-sharing.
A market leader in its segment, Ola Shuttle currently runs more than 500 shuttles, covering 120 routes, serving demand at major metro stations, business districts and other high footfall areas in nine cities across India, helping to solve the ‘first-mile, last-mile’ problem. The majority of the routes that are covered by Ola Shuttle have been driven by commuters’ feedback through the product’s unique ‘Suggest a Route’ feature. The growing popularity of Ola Share car-sharing service has made it one of most preferred choices of commuters, and the offering is running successfully in seven cities in India.
As per the latest statistics put together by the company, Ola Shuttle and Ola Share helped keep 2,674,806 vehicles off the road in the Delhi NCR (National Capital Region), since their launch about six months ago. Apart from lowering the number of cars hitting the road, Ola Share and Ola Shuttle also helped bring down CO2 emission levels by 11,621,535 lb (5,271,440kg), as well as saving 580,237 gallons (2,196,436 liters) of fuel, because of users opting for shared rides on the Ola platform across the city.
Raghuvesh Sarup, head of categories and CMO of Ola, said, “Shared mobility is the future of transportation in India, and our Share and Shuttle services have enabled citizens to share their rides and pay only a fraction of the actual trip cost, while contributing toward reduction in vehicular pollution and congestion in their city. Ola Share and Ola Shuttle have emerged as the most friendly shared mobility solutions in India, in addition to being the most eco-friendly and most pocket-friendly. Our mission is to build mobility for a billion people, and I am excited that growing adoption of shared mobility solutions like Share and a Shuttle by eco-friendly citizens of India, will form a large part of this, while caring for the environment. Importantly, our shared mobility solutions have prevented emission of over 87 lakh kilograms of CO2 pan-India; that’s as much as the weight of 2,200 Indian elephants!”
