Dockless bicycle-sharing attracts residents who live in apartment blocks spread across several acres

Until recently, Rohan Kapoor, a Class XI student staying in Adarsh Palm Retreat on Outer Ring Road (ORR) in Bengaluru, had to be picked up and dropped at the exit gate within his own apartment complex. That was because the gate is 2.5 km away from home.

Now, he uses his phone to unlock one of the many bicycles in his sprawling complex and pedals to the gate, where he leaves the cycle and hops on to a bus.

In another part of the city, Shraddha Arun has stopped going to the gym in her apartment complex. Instead, she bikes. She too picks up a bicycle from one of the docking points at the ETA Star The Garden Apartments on Magadi Road. It helps not just with exercise, but also lets her do the groceries a few blocks away.

App-based bicycles

Bicycles are keeping gated communities, with footprints across acres, moving. Residents are turning to app-based bicycles for the internal commute.

All that they need is a mobile phone application. They locate a bike, scan the QR code on it, and unlock it automatically. And then they are off. At the destination, the bicycle can be parked and locked. The system is run using communications technologies like GPRS, GPS and Bluetooth, which allow the maintenance crew to locate and return the bikes to parking stations.

The residential communities are the newest market for bicycle sharing platforms, beyond IT parks, universities and colleges.

Ofo, a dockless bike-sharing platform, is testing the waters at an apartment complex and a college here since January, with 100 bikes offered free at the ETA Star complex, which has 900 houses in 10 blocks.