Heena Sharma Blog

Uber on Monday launched Hourly Rentals , a 24x7 on-demand, intracity service, which allows riders to retain a car with its driver for several hours, and make multiple stops on their journey, due to which they get greater flexibility as they restart their lives after a lengthy lockdown. Hourly Rentals replaces Uber's earlier service called Uber Hire, and provides more flexibility to the rider in terms of choosing options for a ride. Through the new service, Uber is aiming to disrupt the unorganised cab rental service market. "Instead of offering 4-8 hour packages, a rider can now choose to travel as little as 10 km or one hour, up to 12 hours or 120 km, and pay for what he uses the service for," said Prabhjeet Singh, Head of Cities, IndiaSA at Uber. Read More

Ride-hailing major Ola, which is one of the earliest players to launch bike taxi service , is seeing huge demand in smaller cities and towns across several states. Ola Bike is quietly tapping India’s hinterland where users see bike taxis as the most convenient and cheapest mode of commute in the absence of proper taxi service. For example, Ola Bike is operating in towns such as Gaya, Bikaner, Mughalsarai, Tirupati, Ambala, Pathankot, Ajmer, etc. In tier II cities and beyond, bike taxi services are popular because of the lack of public transport infrastructure. Arun Srinivas, chief sales and marketing officer of Ola, says, “Ola Bike has seen large-scale adoption among people living in India’s hinterlands which have not had access to convenient, affordable and reliable on-demand transportation so far, unlike the larger cities.” Ola Bike, which was first launched in 2016, is now accessed by over 150 million users. The firm now claims Ola Bike has expanded to over 200 cities and...

Uber Technologies Inc . faces a new legal attack on its refusal to treat drivers as employees that depicts the company as mistreating not just them but the public at large. A lawyer who’s been fighting the ride-hailing giant in court for six years wants a judge to now take into account the extra costs saddled on California taxpayers by Uber’s business model. Drivers being cheated out of wages and not being reimbursed for expenses causes California to lose out on payroll taxes, attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan said in an interview. Uber also avoids paying premiums for workers compensation, social security, unemployment and disability insurance, and public assistance for drivers who can’t support themselves, she said. The company has warned that attempts to convert its drivers from independent contractors to employees under California’s recently passed AB 5 law, which goes into effect Jan. 1, will be handled as they always have: by its armies of lawyers in courtroom combat. For g...