Uber gearing up to roll out bus seat booking facility in India, says Uber India president

Currently at a pilot stage, the service will be made available by Uber by the end of the year

In a bid to take ride hailing to the masses, Uber India is gearing up to enable commuters to book a bus seat using the Uber app.

Currently at a pilot stage, the service would be made available by the end of the year with the rollout across multiple cities planned for 2023, a top Uber executive said.

“The expectation is to open a completely new addressable segment for Uber...so that we can serve the common man in a holistic way,” Prabhjeet Singh, president, Uber India and South Asia, said in an interview.

He said the experiment with high-capacity vehicles had started recently and the entire technology was being developed in India.

Uber, he said, was trying to address the main concerns of bus commuters which was confidence in getting a seat, ETA (estimated time of arrival) projection, tracking and the comfort of travelling in an air-conditioned vehicle.

“We also discovered the technology that can help in dynamic routing based on supply and demand rather than a bus running on a fixed route. We took the elements of pre-booking, dynamic routing, tracking experience and brought it together for high-capacity vehicles,” Mr. Singh said.

The pilots were operating in the Delhi-Gurugram route with Gurugram Municipal Authority for public transport users, some corporates for employee transportation and some fleet owners, wherein a commuter could book directly.