There is something new going on in the roads in India and you can sense it, but can't explain it. There was a relatively standard list of items which a young professional would need to accomplish in order to move to a new city five years ago; getting a flat, saving for a two-wheeler or a small hatchback if they could afford it. Well, that latter step has been unceremoniously erased today. Rather, users are launching an app, a tiny car is moving toward them on a map and they're on with their day. welcome to India, where friction has been replaced by mere tap on a screen: No more part payments and parking with neighbour or spending Sunday at a service centre, or seeping the outgoings of fuel and coverage. This isn't an insignificant addition to the way things always were done. It is a real paradigm shift in urban India's approach towards mode change and is taking place at a much faster pace in some cities than most in the industry thought.
Mobility as a Service, urbanity - a paradigm change from owning a car to mobility as a service.
Place a bet on anyone in Mumbai, Bangalore or Delhi on why they have not purchased a car and you will find that they have either said traffic, petrol/diesel or parking. The outer ring road of Bangalore can make the 12 km journey to and from the city a 90 minute affair during rush hours. Being a geographical anomaly, everything in Mumbai can be done through just a few arterial roads and even a short journey from Andheri to Bandra can consume an hour you didn't want to waste. Delhi has its own factor – the air quality warnings and odd-even regulations which make car ownership more of a burden than anything, not just an inconvenience.
Highlighting the calculus just became harsher, as fuel prices have become more and more crazy. At more than the ‘comfort zone' of ability to purchase petrol in most metros, people who in theory can afford to buy a car are forced to start doing the sums on whether they really do need one. Once you factor in EMI's, insurance renewal dates, the dropping value as soon as you drive it off the lot, you start to feel as if there's nothing better than being a car owner, except for the regular bills that come along with it - and it doesn't even help you get to work quicker.
Not to mention parking — which is probably the biggest, yet least talked about, reason for this change. Most of the Indian cities did not plan parking facilities keeping in view the present number of vehicles on the road. Two cars per household was the typical space allowance for builders in the 1990' and early 2000's and three cars was rarely included. This translates to double parked lanes, hours spent in search of a parking spot near your office and month's worth parking fees in cities like Mumbai that can be as high as a part of someone's rent. When a professional, in the twilight age of 25-35, considers all this, a no-maintenance, no-subscription, no-parking car that arrives at one's doorstep when needed and leaves when they're not could be a lot more like common sense than extravagance.
It's a true tale of India's increased ease with MaaS. It's not about the fall in love of people with ride-hailing apps. The problem is that people do very basic cost-benefit calculations and realize that if they have an asset that is depreciating and they don't use it for something else, but sit in traffic, that doesn't make sense because you can get the same effect without paying for it if you just use a phone tap.
The importance of being on the go - with a fast experience and smooth user interface.
Economic factors are not the only driver of the transition away from car ownership: so are expectations. After people have become accustomed to having it happen automatically and seamlessly, this expectation carries over to all other activities they conduct on their phones, such as reading the news, arranging travel or looking for their next rental car.
- But lag is not acceptable any longer, it's zero tolerance. An 8-second delay in opening a map isn't acceptable to a commuter waiting at a bus stand on a hot and humid day in Mumbai who has to book a cab before his next train departs. The same "I-want-it-now" mentality extends to their use of a browser, as well: if the page doesn't load quickly enough, they'll move on to a different page — or to another site entirely — before the first paragraph appears.
- It's no longer an option to be mobile first! Most of the internet traffic (or traffic for that matter) that India receives, is through medium level Android phones on poor 4G coverage. A website that is designed mainly for desktop usage and has been minimised for mobile usage is nearly always a clunky website on the road – and most transit research does take place there.
- Whether or not someone reads your content and whether it's light or heavy weight code is directly related. When it comes to a commuter, looking at a route on the go, heavy data-intensive and image-heavy designs with unnecessary scripts running in the background is important to them. That's not just a "nice to have", it's the decision to a person's completion of an article or them "bouncing" after 3 seconds.
- Just as a user's perception of speed is important to their experience, so is the speed metric to search visibility. Google increasingly favors pages that perform well and respond quickly to touch interactions and, if a transport blog has a slow theme, it's going to be difficult for it to outpace a page that has taken care to ensure that it is fast and responsive.
Several frameworks have been developed to make them more suitable for niche publishers, and are now the practical option. By default, architecture owners might have a sluggishly slow generic, bloated theme beneath months of nice content, which is what has inspired builders for regional transit portals, automotive information websites, or native travel blogs to go with the SEO friendly theme that has superior efficiency, like Piki Templates, which we've known about for some time now, is already talked about on this area.
The app and web experience need to be consistent as it fosters trust. If that same person who takes just under 10 seconds to request a ride spends another 10 seconds contemplating a header image on your blog, the frustration can cause them to not read any further--no matter how well the rest of the web page will come out.
To Accelerate the growth of Travel Blogs & Transport Hubs for the Indian market.
The mobility revolution has also given rise to a whole new side economy of bloggers and small publishers ranging from EV adoption in tier-2 cities to honest reviews on who does a better job of tackling surge pricing during the monsoons, from the ride-hailing app perspective. While it is a great opportunity, there is an issue that every new creator is not aware of – when it comes to Indian transport content, it has a tendency to rise sharply and swiftly. A post about the rising fuel prices, or a tweet from the cab aggregator service or a viral post on a particular city's traffic can cause a tidal wave of mobile traffic to a small blog in matter of hours.
Dealing with spikes like this will need that light weight foundation, from the start, along with a well-built structure, rather than an overly rich template that has been used with a number of plugins never intended to handle the traffic of multiple mobile devices. Creators who are successful early on do not use themes from blogger or CMS designed for ecommerce or portfolio purposes, but rather for content sites, because the focus is not on a product, it's about getting the text rendered quickly, a sensible structure of headings, and having as few unnecessary scripts as possible.
This is even more important for transport and travel niches as readers of articles on road trip, fuel efficiency or the habits of city commuters are mostly mobile and they're all impatient. If your blogger is covering Ladakh road trip routes or comparing fares for cabs between cities, they're about to come up against every other blogger on every other topic — even if what readers disdain is a (literally) instantly-on-app experience. It's the publishers who are just as exacting with the technical footwork of their website as they are with their research and writing who outrank and hold on to their visitors, and not lose them to the next search result down who is faster.
As technology has progressed, the Road Ahead has become Digital.
Indian roads are not having a "discount code" and "promotional/sale" craze over just now. It's a structural change influenced by the real economic pressures that are making owning a car increasingly costly and impractical – from pricey petrol to the lack of parking and increasingly congested roads that make car ownership more of an annoyance than a liberation. In an era where it's all about mobility, the platforms and the publishers catering to this new generation of users will be evaluated in nature of their users' wisely used cab booking apps: Does it work instantly, frictionless and without delay. The expectation is the same, whether it's a guy calling for a taxi on the Bangalore streets, or a blog-reader, checking out a taxi at 11 p.m. on her phone. The relationship between speed, clarity and good design isn't the same as it was any longer — now on the roads of India, it's on their screens.
