Uber Bike Cab Service Currently Illegal In Bengalaru

The bike cab service offered by Uber is currently illegal in Bengalaru as there is no law to regulate it.

Karnataka hasn’t imposed a ban on the bike cab services, but ride-sharing applications like Ola and Uber technologies will need to keep waiting until the Government of Karnataka introduces a set of rules according to the Motor Vehicles Act regarding their governance.

Until the notification of the rules, services by Ola and Uber in the city of Bengaluru recently remain illegal, stated officials of the transport department. The law is silent on the operation of bike taxis, stated a senior official of the transport department, Nevertheless, Goa has solved this problem by introducing some new regulations to regulate bike cabs a year ago to allow their operation.

Last week, aggregators launched bike cabs reckoning silence in the law as consent under the legislation because bike cabs are quite new in Bengalaru, and the absence of clarity has resulted in a few problems.

Transport officials claimed that a bike is registered for personal use. If a bike’s owner is interested in using it for fulfilling any commercial purpose, then he/she cannot do that without first bringing the vehicle under transport category and follow up by taking a permit from the concerned transport authority.

Commercial automobiles, officials told, are regulated by appropriate laws and in such scenario, the state government will need to notify rules specifying what kind of bikes could be permitted for operating as cabs, the type of license which should be possessed by drivers, obligations on the service provider’s part, the longest distance it is eligible to travel, the fare structure followed by service providers, and taxes they must pay.

In Goa, the rules mention obligations to follow, bike cabs charge fare of $0.04 per km and a minimum fare of $0.15. Karnataka’s transport authorities are currently making efforts to formulate a set of regulations, but it is yet in the preparatory phase and needs to go through few layers of hierarchy before it turns into a regulation.

In fact, if an automobile needs to be driven to provide transportation service, then its manufacturer has to give NOC allowing it to provide transportation service. When an application for a permit was filed by Royal Brothers to provide rental facilities for Royal Enfield bikes in the state, it had given its requests along with NoC from the maker.

Karnataka does not have its own rental facilities scheme, but what helped Royal Brothers out was that the rules already notified by center for the provision of rental services.