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Ola Share | Is it safe?

No I am not talking if it is safe from the perspective of with whom (stranger) I will share the cab with but from the angle of road safety.

Ola Share is something I experienced for the first time the other day. Two interesting things (a) Technologically and (b) Economically it sounded a great idea.  Technologically because the machine is able to match people requirement and the path of the cab and make sure that it put strangers who might be travelling along the same route into a single cab and economically because it burns less fuel, saves the passenger full fare of the cab. 

Sharing a taxi or an autorickshaw (or auto for short) in Mumbai or several cities in India is not new; has been used by people for ages. Very often either the destination or the boarding place of all the passengers is common. Which means the auto picks up all the passengers from a location A (say a railway station) and drops them at location B, location C and location D etc ... making sure that A-B-C-D-... are in some form connected. Most often these shared-auto routes are fixed! No deviations allowed. This is green to the country, economic to passenger.

Ola Share (and UberPool I guess is same as Ola Share) is different. It is less rigid and more flexible in terms of once a person books a can say from location A to location X, any other person who is in the motorable path between A and X can share the ride. Say a person at a location B (which is between location A and location X) can seek a ride to go to a location X or beyond say location Z. This is the flexibility that the share provides.

 This flexibility is what is the cause of safety. 

 Once the first passenger is onboard, the driver focuses less on the road and more on his mobile device to pick up his second (possible) passenger, while the Ola machine (algorithm) figures out a possible passenger, the diver has to "accept the second passenger" by clicking on his mobile device. He has to decide if it makes sense to pick the second passenger, he has to figure out if he has to take any detour to pick the passenger etc. High on cognitive load + his need to accept the passenger by clicking a button makes him drive with lesser concentration. This makes the drive unsafe.

 Possibly one way to make it a little (just a little) safe is to enable the driver to speak /Yes/ or /No/ to accept the second passenger.

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Location: Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

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