Friday, September 21, 2007

What it takes to manage transport ?

What if one day, you could use a smart card and travel around India. You use multiple modes, be it Rail, Bus, Air, Taxi or even an Autorickshaw. Huh...Is that possible ? We have 1.136 billion people. Yes smart card is smart enough to store all details about the person including how much credit he has in his card and every time he swipes it, he credit comes down .
But will it be viable enough to leave it that loose ?. Somebody needs to centrally manage it. Who is going to do it ?. Now if you ask why really we need it, its because we have multiple vendors catering from the most spread of autorickshaw drives till the most organized like Airlines or Rail. And if somebody doesnt keep track of all those transactions, the fraud is knocking the door. Dont ever dream any central organization can track transactions even if a percent of our population travels every day.
But what if we could track it. What are the returns out of that ?
Yes ease of use for customer. But for what ?. All are happy with Cash or Credit cards.
We mean business here. Its savings for the transport company. Its the costly fuel which is saved. Its intelligent means to allocate more mechanisms of travel in routes where we see lots of traffic, its how we should reduce Jams. Its about understanding people's need of how they want to commute. Its about fleet management.
So let says somebody comes forward in 2020 to do this kind of business. Probably then all autorickshaw would have some kind of handheld devices which get tracked by GPS and passes on the trasaction details to central server. And somebody is tracking where you are travelling. You cannot afford to hide.

Aura

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