Transcript

A New way to move around the city | Vivekanada Hallekere | TEDxBMSITM

[Applause] thanks for inviting uh a pleasure to share uh what we are doing at bounce and also tell you why we are doing what we are doing how many of you uh know what is shared mobility uh let me start off with uh saying how we believe that shared mobility is going to save the world and also make world a better place so mostly a cliche thing that you say but uh we really mean it here so i'll just explain uh why we think uh shared mobility is super important super critical for both the economy and how how the world revolves so india you know is more than a billion people living here uh super congested the density of uh people living in india is super super high if you see a united states of america probably it's seven times larger than india but lesser population a lot of people in india which also means that it's super tough for authorities to plan how how should the cities be so there are two ways of building cities one is uh you focus on the center of the city uh it's called the central business district and people live in the suburbs and everyone comes to central business district so you take any of the western uh western uh develop economics usually built on that way say if you take seattle seattle uh people stay in suburbs come to work they go back so under vertically uh the city grows but in india if you take bangalore bangalore was never planned uh bangalore was was a friendship was paradise um i still remember when i came to bangalore in 2002 uh all the way from hospital to college there was only one traffic signal now there are some full traffic signals and takes massive amount of time so the cities were not planned in india right and also what's happening in india is that we are seeing massive urbanization which means that people from smaller towns are coming to cities to in search of livelihood and this is not this is something which is not happening in the western cities but india is because it's growing at a great speed uh we're seeing massive urbanization so when i say massive urbanization about 40 of people from smaller towns are going to cities and you see the number of cities in india which are actually provide live earth they're very few uh four to five cities which actually provide for the tech the tech growth which india is seeing or india was never known for the factories so the factories have never took up under manufacturing something not great in india so it's always the service sector which takes a lot of pressure so which means that cities like bangalore gets crowded and crowded every engineer in college uh across canada probably people end up in bangalore or pune or mumbai right so so the cities are getting super consistent and this problem of congestion will not get solved on its own it's not a problem where you can say that okay it will give time and it gets solved because the population is growing organization is taking up which means that there'll be more and more people so this problem is not solved for will only become much more and more and where the cities can collapse so bangalore bmdc used to move 5 million people every day now it moves 3 million people every day do you know how many buses they have which moves about 3 million people every day 6500 buses is the total fleet of which we don't know how many are functional so when when i do you know the business uh commercial folks in u.s or europe i say that the bank of public transport moves uh three to five million people a day they're like oh fantastic public transport has taken off but i say it is in it is from 6500 buses so i explained to them what is food body and food coding is something that we have romanticized in bollywood right so but imagine people have to move day and day out like that to get to the livelihood people die right people die when because they're just grabbing something and they're hanging out outside the bus it's not very safe but millions of people in bangalore move daily to work that way i've been working on transport we started as a luxury motorcycle random business then we started doing commute so i've been i've spent almost six years around commute transport as such one thing i've realized is what is the importance of mobility for the development of city or development of the particular region that we are talking about and also we have realized over time that um this is the term that we have coined uh we we believe that mobility has to be seen as a fundamental right um i'll tell you why and how when i say fundamental right we're now putting a very very tough uh and a lot of importance for the world right we're saying nobody has to be seen like a fundamental right fundamental right like how we are right to speak right to get educated so we're saying that nobody has to be seen as a fundamental right and going back to the numbers that we have we have 1.35 billion people to whom we have to give this fundamental right to access right so why is mobility so important uh you want to get to college you want to go to tuitions um you want to get to some work mobility plays a very important role i will try to put it in perspective for you um so let's say you have a maid at your place and you want to ship your house to another place say three four kilometers away 99.99 of the times the maid can't relocate because she has to stay close to where you stay and the amount of money that she can earn totally depends on how many houses she can basically go and work in the vicinity if you if you ask her to take another two kilometers of change of workplace it's impossible for them so the amount of work that you can do totally depends on how much time you have to travel and where is the work right so this mobility play is a very important road you take it for anyone uh be it for a student be for someone who is working mobility plays a very important role and today we spend a lot of time commuting because we what we resorted to because we did not focus on growing the city in the right way was owning two wheelers or four wheelers because that was the easiest way right so we thought okay it's easier to buy personal vehicles india is close to about 150 million two wheelers alone and india adds about 25 million two wheelers year on year 25 million two wheelers year on year are bought in india it gets the largest tubular market um but this also results to a problem right so if we say that okay people have enough money if they can buy their own two wheelers for winners has the problem around community sold or if you're talking about mobility as a fundamental right if government gives free two wheelers or four winners to everyone is the problem solved absolutely not right because we don't have enough space enough space to move on the roads or enough space to even park um i'll show you a simple stack this is this is a standard i saw in mumbai about mumbai so mumbai you know mumbai uh is again a lot of people in mumbai so i'll just again analyze this map for you i'll give you a second so that you can read the map twenty percent of the land mass is taken up by parking whereas 52 of the population live within 9.25 of the landmass so we give more space for parking than for humans right so you can um you can see this in workplaces as well uh you're talking about workplace so the workplace is uh two into two uh but your four-wheeler two-wheeler takes more space uh so so this is what will happen if people resort to buying their own two wheelers before four-wheelers and but today there are no no other alternate right i drive my own car uh i take metro whenever i'm going towards indiana because i know that there is a metro connecting today i know my last month is sorted but there are particular towns that i prefer to take my own four-wheeler um i would love to pool but then no products are on pool um three seats are empty and i take a lot of space right so this is what each one of us are doing and we can't find a solution uh for now on how do we deconstruct the road or how can we make better utilization of the vehicle this is where i go back to my point saying that shared mobility is super important for the cities otherwise cities get congested people start hating to live in that city which means the city will collapse so uh if we leave uh bangalore aziz for next few years i think bangalore will not be the most preferred place of work for anyone be it investors breed for talent so this is where i go back to the point saying that shared mobility is super important i'll again uh try and tell you more about what do we what do i mean by shareholding is it only scooters is it only cars what what exactly are we talking about so there's a whole gamut of things which can be done in shared mobility and are we not already doing shared mobility in india absolutely we have shared mobility in india but probably it's not very organized and it's not very scalable and it's not even transparent because it's done in pockets there's no transparency but with the advent of test now we can make it very transparent very scalable and actually take it to the take to the masses uh not just in metros but also in smaller towns so you know delhi pollution i hate going to delhi but i love the food there but yeah so how do we fix this again i spoke about the fundamental right part of it right so so there are multiple aspects so i think we have to move from um um we haven't put the human in the first now and talk about the use cases so today the use cases as in if you have to go from point a to point b you'd get your own four wheeler or two wheeler right you don't think twice on what is the right way to go that you don't think about the carbon footprint you don't talk about thinking about congestion or whatever for this a lot of things have to take place right as in uh metros have to be built but are metro's viable for every city probably not metros take billions of dollars so metro is not always the right solution for every city size uh and also there is a lot of debate which is going on you can find a lot of materials saying that our metro is the right kind of public transport for a polycentric city uh in the central business district what happens is that you can build a neural network where you can build a rail network so that everything everyone comes to the center of the city where they work uh the center of the city it's always vertical so you can provide first my last mile walking everything and it can be sorted but in the polycentric nature of the city metro might not be the only solution that's where india is innovating on bus lanes so bangalore has started with dedicated bustlings where you don't need a massive investment in terms of uh infrastructure but it works out it can still move about 100 people in the bus we don't need for any uh further in philosophy so india is really innovating on how to move people from point a to point b and also what everyone has realized is that there's no copy paste solution which will work for india we have to think of a solution and multiple solutions to co-exist that's when the shared mobility can actually take off so we've tried to put a few things here so one the center one you can think as a bus transport a shared bus transport you can see a kick scooter which is very tiny which can be used for um in india pretty tough because you don't have dedicated lanes for low speed vehicles uh for up to two kilometers or to one kilometer i think we can do it on smaller vehicles which are electric and which can be shared again um scooters scooters have a great product market in india right today the way that we see two wheelers is that okay we buy two wheelers and what do we do with the two wheelers most of the two wheelers are not used for more than two hours a day um and again they consume massive amount of parking uh the same parking could have been public parks or it can be nice seeking area but today we have had lots and lots of parking spaces right so the big bounce what we did was we said the two-wheeler which has a great product market for it can it be shared by multiple people in one day as a uh why should one person have access to one vehicle uh when 20 people can use the same scooter at different points of time and in different places that is what we have built out of bombs i'm sure most of you know bombs so this is a shared uh mobility on two wheeler that we have built um what what do we need to do when it when it comes to shared mobility we have to just enable access to vehicle we have to build asset safety we have to build a trust so that people can actually rely on this so these are three important things which has to be done for any shared mobility so people should realize that you should think that it's a trustworthy solution which can be relied on again it can be done through tech it should be accessible when multiple people again take place a very important role uh and we have to come up with innovative ways of funding these vehicles so this is what it takes for every every search of shared mobility i've also put carpool there uh in india carpool has not taken up forget about india most of across the globe carpool is still not taken off in the way it has to take off why uh because people who can afford cars uh most of the times wouldn't care about sharing the cost of the right right the pitch has been around sharing the cost of the ride so i there is a lot of innovation which is possible now with pooling where we can say that hey um i like to trek so i want i want to talk to someone who i'm planning to do a trek i want i want to talk to someone i want to pull with someone who also knows about tracking so you can put people together when uh it can be like based on interest-based pooling right so a lot of innovation is possible on shared mobility which is which does just does not solve for condition but also solves for real life problems uh so again sharing is not very uh uh new to india right as and we have always been sharing whatever so we have been sharing everything right so uh gastoners so we talk about battery swapping infrastructure right so for electric vehicles we talk about battery swapping infrared how can electric mobility take off the batteries have to be charged and it has to be smart so goguro in taiwan has built automated swapping centers but india has been doing that for ages so india has a great network of gas distribution where you call someone and you get a gas delivered to your house within within a day's time so that's so swapping is very known to india and these are things which are which are being innovated in india in terms of this kind of networks right so sharing is not very new thing for india so we just have to now make enable uh this will take and probably scale it up so this explains how a shared scooter works um you can find the near scooter on the app book the scooter get access to the vehicle there are no keys to the scooter uh so these are keyless this is iot that we've built um we've uh innovated a lot to make the vehicle really robust in terms of access to the vehicle uh so the authentication happens from the cell phone once you get once you can unlock the vehicle you ride yourself like it was your own vehicle leave it in a legal parking and walk around so this this solution looks very simple but to execute this is a massive airport today uh it's been about 18 months that we started bouncing vinyl um we do close to about three million plus rights in bangalore that's uh three million rights uh a month uh or uh in terms of perspective per day it's close to 120 000 rights we do a day which is almost one third of what metro does uh environment but to pull this off uh we've gone through massive efforts in terms of engineering finally worked with a bunch of engineers from mit and a bunch of local guys we figured the solution the solutions were very subtle but very challenging for another instance we are saying that okay we'll show the scooter on the map right so how do you make sure that scooter is actually there because the location is not very accurate so how do we actually we are depending on the telecom network and telecom network is not very stable this is a gps track so now how do you make sure that the vehicle is actually there because we're talking about trust right when we talk about shared mobility there has to be trust we're asking you to give up your own vehicle and use shared mobility so trust is super important so how do you make the vehicle really show the vehicle where it is uh even on that so we've done multiple iterations one was iot we also went through um non-tech solutions what we started doing was i started asking users to take a photo of the picture put on the scooter once they end the ride and also type the landmark so that we can show it to the next user so this is something which was very uh not tech based solution but it was more in terms of making sure that the next user can see the photo of the scooter and also figure out the landmark and access to the vehicle so we have done this over a period of time uh we've scaled this now so india bangalore is known as world's uh sharing capital now uh it has the highest number of sharing scooters across the globe uh people across europe uh they come to us today to understand how to scale things so this is the innovation has just come from bangalore uh it's a form factor which is already there no innovation on the scooter uh no innovation on uh saying that okay you should use scooter people who are already using scooter what we've what we've done is saying that hey you don't have to buy a scooter to go from point a to point b one scooter can be used by 20 people so today uh uh most of the times uh one scooter is used by at least 20 people in our in our involved studies so that is imagine the impact and imagine this on electric why would electric happen uh because it's we have vested interest in that uh our economics makes sense when it is electric i don't have fuel fuel phase that i have to worry about i don't have to worry about servicing uh in terms of oil change traveling so sheer nobody companies like bonds today will push for uh electric mobility to happen so these are the benefits of shared mobility assets which will throw to uh which will be kind of populated to the public at large so um global scenario cycles have taken off really well europe has flooded with cycles why um they have very dedicated lanes they have public transport which has already been built for i told you why it is so hard there are multiple things crazy sensors that we have built how do you make sure the vehicle there are robust how do we make sure people don't steal things people used to steal the tires how now we've made uh in such a way that the tires can't be stolen we built our own electric vehicle now uh because there was no electric scooter out there so from march you'll start seeing electric scooters built from india which i think is one of the craziest things of being a startup if you try solving a problem and do whatever is required uh i encourage each one of you to think how can we actually solve for this problem around morbidity and condition because as long as humans are around we will have to move from point a to point b and the problem of mobility is going to be there forever so uh it will just keep changing uh but the problem on mobility is going to be there forever so i think it started from the time we invented the wheel the problem is going to be there forever so please think on this this is the last problem and the solutions are never enough with this and i'd like to end my chat thanks