New taxi-sharing scheme. A nudge in the right direction?

For the past two months, Auronet readers have been regularly informed about taxi-sharing possibilities on the route to Chennai. A table tells them where the taxis are going (airport or city), when, and how many places are available in each taxi. This is an initiative of the Shared Transport Service (STS), a group dedicated to making, among other things, better use of our community transport resources.

Taxi-sharing, of course, is not a new idea in Auroville. There is a regular taxi-sharing section in the News and Notes where individuals advertise spare seats in taxis they have booked, and in the past some of our taxi services have offered to facilitate the sharing of rides. The latter has never taken off, however. So why should the latest attempt at putting taxi-sharing on a more organized basis be any more successful?

“The previous attempts were made from a different perspective,” explains Min, one of the STS team. “The taxi services would facilitate sharing if somebody asked for it but otherwise no effort was made to match people going to the same place at the same time because it was not really in the taxi company’s interest: it was more profitable for them to hire two taxis rather than one.

“However, STS is a service. We go out of our way to match passengers with rides as we want to raise the number of shared taxi trips in order to reduce the carbon released into the atmosphere. So our motivation is very different from the previous attempts.”

The latest initiative seems to have touched a chord. Although it has been operating for only two months, as of 25th April, STS was able to prevent 101 single-taxi trips to Chennai resulting in carbon savings of 4,737 kgs and cost savings of Rs 222,200. “This shows that people do want to share but there has never been an adequate platform before to do this”, remarks Vijay, another member of the team.

It has not been plain sailing, however. At present, only one Auroville taxi company, Auro Cabs, has signed up for the new scheme as the other companies fear that taxi-sharing will affect their profitability. So why did Auro Cabs take the plunge?

“I felt it was the right way to go,” says Raju, manager of Auro Cabs. But he had difficulty in convincing his drivers. Under the old system, if a passenger booked a trip to the airport and another one booked a return trip, Auro Cabs would collect Rs 4,600. The driver’s salary would be 10% of this, plus Rs .100 plus any tips. Under the new taxi-sharing scheme, the total amount collected for a similar journey would be only Rs 2,600 so, on the face of it, the drivers would be losing.

“That is why many of them wanted to refuse shared bookings at first. But I told them to imagine they are someone needing a ride. If one company is charging you Rs 2400 and another Rs.800 for the same ride with taxi-sharing, which one would you go for?’”

Raju explained that because Auro Cabs was the only company at present offering taxi-sharing, they would get more orders. So whereas at present the drivers might earn good money once or twice a week, now they could be earning a minimum of Rs 360 every day as they would be driving more trips. “So they agreed to try it. In fact, as I anticipated, our bookings have definitely increased because of this scheme.”

In spite of the popularity of the new site, Min calculates that at present Auro Cabs provides only 10% of the taxi trips to Chennai. And it must be admitted that while taxi-sharing has obvious financial benefits to the passengers because they share the cost of the ride, it also has potential drawbacks. This includes the risk of being bored to death for three hours by a garrulous passenger, and not having the convenience of traveling with one’s favorite driver or being picked up or dropped at exactly the time and place that one wishes.

But the STS team points out that some people welcome having someone to talk to on the long drive to Chennai – it has even seen the beginning of deep friendships. They have also located a cheap restaurant near the airport where passengers can await their ride if it doesn’t coincide with the timing of their arrival, and for trips to the city they are identifying a few convenient locations where passengers can be dropped off and picked up.

Some people feel the present website needs to be streamlined or prefer to find their fellow passengers themselves, as the STS is charging a few hundred rupees just to connect one passenger to another. But the STS team is working on simplifying the sign-up table and have already revised their rates downwards.

But if this initiative really takes off, can Auro Cabs cope on its own? Vijay clarifies that it was never the intention to limit taxi-sharing to just one company. “We wanted all the Auroville taxis to be involved. It was just that Raju was the only one willing to take the initial plunge. Even now we are willing to use other taxi services if Auro Cabs is not available. The main thing for us is to get the sharing to happen.”

If all the Auroville taxi services do sign up, it would solve the problem of the availability of vehicles. But wouldn’t it also mean that all the taxi services would lose out as the more passengers share rides, the less profit will accrue to the taxi companies and Auro Cabs will lose their present advantage?

Min sees it rather differently. “All the Auroville taxi services are suffering right now, except perhaps Unity Transport and Auro Cabs. It’s a tough business to be in because outside taxi companies have a different business model and can offer lower fares: some people will use them just to save Rs. 100 on a trip to Chennai.

“At the same time, Uber and Ola have already started taxi sharing in big cities – Ola is already in Pondicherry – and their apps are increasingly sophisticated. So what I told all the Auroville taxi companies is that if we come together now and create a common platform with a good app, we may be able to corner the Pondicherry market (the Ashram is already interested). We have about 60 taxis in Auroville at present, and this would provide enough work for everybody.”

In the long term, Min and the STS team also envisage a shared transport service in Auroville that would allow people to move seamlessly from one mode of transport to another when the need arises – for example, a cycle could be temporarily exchanged for a motorbike for a quick trip to Pondicherry.

Whatever the trajectory of these larger visions, one of the most fascinating aspects of the present taxi-sharing scheme is that it kills two birds with one stone. While customers are happy that they save money on shared trips – and this is the main motivation for most people – at the same time it is reducing the amount of carbon and other pollutants released into the atmosphere. In this sense, it is a classic example of a ‘nudge’ strategy that benefits both the individual and the larger collective.

Min feels that people in Auroville are not yet ready for actions where their personal convenience level goes down. However, schemes like taxi-sharing work because the individual pay-back is immediate and the environmental savings can be calculated instantly.

So can the same kind of approach be extended to other areas in Auroville? Min mentions the ‘Library of Things’ which will be up and running soon. The Library of Things, which is happening in many communities around the world, encourages people to donate items they rarely use to a central space where people can access them freely or for a small fee. Once they have finished with them, they return them for others to use.

This is part of a much wider movement described by one of its founders, Rachel Botsman, as ‘collaborative consumption’. Botsman points out that many people in the developing world have numerous tools and appliances that they use only rarely – the average usage of a power drill during its entire lifetime, for example, is only about 12 minutes – and that we can cut down on the excessive consumption that is destroying our planet by facilitating the sharing of such things.

“This is something very close to our hearts,” says Min. “We believe that the more sharing and collaboration there is, the more sustainably we can live.”

The concept also fits very well with the Auroville ideal of non-ownership. However, it has its own challenges. For example, individuals released from the responsibility of ownership do not always look after the things they are borrowing: the sense that something ‘belongs to nobody in particular’ can lead to careless usage.

This makes the building and measuring of trust a paramount issue in such projects. “Sharing used to happen spontaneously in many communities,” points out Min, “because we all knew each other well: we knew who we could and couldn’t trust. But in the outside world these days people move around so much that they don’t know each other well, so they don’t have the basis to build trust. This means that peer-to-peer sharing networks like Airbnb have to find other ways of assessing the trustworthiness of people who are using them.”

In a small community like Auroville, the situation is rather different. Yet even here there have been instances in the past when collective items have not been well cared for.

“Some people say there should be complete trust between us,” says Min, “but it doesn’t work like that. There has to be some kind of accountability. For our Library of Things we can’t have a free-for-all; we need to define some conditions. For example, if somebody damages a stool they have borrowed, we will put this on the website and ask if anybody would like to help pay for it. But if this happens three times with the same individual, people will feel they don’t want to help any more: that individual’s collective reputation will have suffered.”

Raju notes that trust builds trust. “For example, I am running a cycle hire for visitors very successfully, partly because I trust the people. I feel there is already a basis of trust among Aurovilians but we could do better, for trust is a must in Auroville.”