Making the Connection: Uber Moto and Public Transport in Hyderabad, India

By Harrison Peck, Cities and Transportation Policy Manager, and Rainer Lempert, Applied Scientist, Mobility Research

In May 2023, WXY Studio and Uber’s Policy team released Future of Cities and Share Mobility in India, a report arguing that policies supporting shared mobility are key to avoiding a car-oriented future in Indian cities. The article below is a follow-up to this report, focusing on Uber Moto bike taxis as a connector to public transport to provide mobility access to more people in more places.

Raidurg Station, Hyderabad (Photo credit: Syed Junaidur Rahman Qadri)

Introduction

To access public transport, people who live or work outside a network’s reach need a reliable and affordable way to get to their nearest transport stop. This “first/last-mile gap” can be particularly challenging for cities in many low- and middle-income countries, where lower car ownership rates, more limited transport networks, and inadequate pedestrian conditions often leave residents of outlying communities with scant options for longer journeys. While Uber has long served as a connector to public transport, in recent years we’ve expanded our multimodal offerings in low-and middle-income countries with services such as Uber Moto, which connects riders to bike taxi trips. With lower fares and the ability to maneuver through busy or narrow streets, Uber Moto is uniquely suited to filling the gap to public transport.

To more closely explore the relationship between Uber Moto and public transport, we conducted an analysis of Uber Moto ridership patterns in Hyderabad, India, a city with an extensive rail network and a robust Uber Moto business. Our objective was to determine the extent to which riders use Uber Moto to access public transport. The answer to this question can have important implications for transportation planning in the city, where car ownership is growing rapidly, and the rail network captures just 2% of trips.

A natural experiment in public transport

We hypothesized that Uber Moto extends the service area of public transport by offering quick and affordable rides to stations that are too far to access on foot. To explore this theory, we studied shifts in Moto riders’ travel patterns as Hyderabad gradually extended its Blue Line westward (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Map of Hyderabad Blue Line. HITEC City Station opened on March 20, 2019, becoming the western terminus. On November 29, 2019 Raidurg Station opened, becoming the new terminus. (Shapes courtesy of OSM.)

Hyderabad’s Blue Line runs 26 kilometers east-west, north of the central business district. It was built over 7 years in 3 phases, with the newest, westernmost segment from HITEC City to Raidurg opening in November, 2019. The opening of this 3rd phase provided a “natural experiment” for study, allowing us to draw connections between a real-world transport change and our Uber Moto trip data. Specifically, we plotted Uber Moto trips bound for HITEC City and Raidurg Stations — trips ending within a 150-meter radius of the stations — between September 2019 and January 2023 (excluding irregular data during the pandemic, from April 2020-January 2022) to capture Moto ridership patterns both before and after Raidurg Station opened.

How Uber Moto complements public transport

Uber Moto effectively extends the Metro Blue Line’s service area. Prior to the opening of Raidurg Station, HITEC City Station saw a steady volume of Uber Moto trips. When Raidurg Station opened, though, not only did Uber Moto demand to the Raidurg Station area spike, as might be expected, but Moto demand to HITEC City Station area dropped precipitously at the same time (Figure 2, left). This simultaneous rise and fall demonstrates how Uber Moto ridership shifted toward the new Blue Line terminus, a trend that continues to the present (Figure 2, right).

Figure 2. Moto trips per week ending within 150m from HITEC City Station and Raidurg Station. Data from March 10, 2020 — January 1, 2023 removed due to abnormal travel patterns during the COVID19 pandemic.

Uber Moto riders are public transport users. We then mapped the origins of Uber Moto riders’ first-mile trips to Raidurg and HITEC City Stations to explore how the new metro terminus impacts geographic shifts in travel. This analysis revealed that, prior to the opening of Raidurg Station, HITEC City Station captured Uber Moto demand from the north, west, and south, as it was the closest rail station to riders in all of these communities. Now, HITEC City mostly attracts riders from Kondapur to the north, for which it remains the closest, most easily accessible Blue Line station, while Raidurg draws the bulk of riders from west and south (Figure 3). Observing shifts in Uber Moto riders’ station of choice following changes to the transport network supports our hypothesis that Moto riders use the product to connect to public transport and demonstrates a strong overlap between Moto riders and transport users.

Figure 3. Left: Origins of Moto trips to HITEC City Station between September — November 2019, prior to the Raidurg opening. Top right: Origins of Moto trips to HITEC City Station between December 2019 — February 2020, after Raidurg opening. Bottom right: Origins of Moto trips to Raidurg station between December 2019 — February 2020.

Proportionally, Moto is the most utilized mode on Uber for accessing the station. Moto isn’t the only mode on Uber’s platform that riders use to get to Hyderabad’s Metro Blue Line: our natural experiment reveals that three- and four-wheeled trips (on products like UberAuto and Uber Go respectively) follow similar patterns to Moto following the opening of Raidurg Station.

However, relative to these other modes, Uber Moto disproportionately fulfills demand to Raidurg Station. We find that, in Q1 2023, 66% of Uber Moto trips ending in the wider Raidurg area (within 500 meters of the station) terminate at the station, and 1.3% of all Moto trips in Hyderabad end at the station. On the other hand, just 19% of four-wheeled trips ending in the wider station area and only 0.2% of all four-wheeled Hyderabad trips terminate at the station. The density of Uber Auto (3-wheeled rickshaw) trips comes closer to matching Moto trips, with 59% of the Raidurg area and 0.7% of all Hyderabad trips terminating at the station. Despite a higher volume of Uber Auto than Uber Moto trips overall across Hyderabad, we find a roughly equal number of Moto and Auto trips terminating at Raidurg Station. These findings corroborate our hypothesis that Moto trips are best suited for accessing public transport.

Figure 4. Moto is used preferentially as a first-mile connector to Raidurg Station compared to four-wheeled vehicles on the Uber platform.

Supporting multimodal journeys in India

This natural experiment provides evidence that travelers in Hyderabad use Uber Moto to fill the first-mile public transport gap, particularly relative to other modes on our platform. While this study is limited to just 2 station areas in Hyderabad, its findings suggest that bike taxis can effectively extend the reach of the city’s public transport network by providing fast, affordable connections to transit-poor areas. In doing so, Uber Moto can help drive ridership toward the city’s extensive high-capacity rail network, supporting objectives around emission reduction, sustainable mobility, and wider access to jobs and other destinations. More broadly, this study demonstrates that, particularly when used in conjunction with public transport, shared mobility services like Uber Moto can help support longer-distance travel for those who do not or cannot own a car.

With a growing appetite to own cars, and dwindling road space to accommodate them, it’s critical that Indian cities embrace a future of shared mobility, and Uber Moto can form a core component of cities’ multimodal strategies.