Cycles to be made Bluetooth-enabled

Sandeep Rana

Chandigarh, January 14

Users will be able to operate cycles of the Public Bicycle Sharing (PBS) project using Bluetooth by mid-March.

Will end glitches caused by network issue

• Locks did not open despite repeated attempts
• Users were not able to lock bikes even as ride time kept running

6K vandalism cases

An official of the company said 6,000 cases of vandalism of PBS property had been reported. “There is an average of two and a half cases of vandalism per cycle. Some cycles were found damaged with stones while the others had broken pedals. Users also dumped bikes at places far from docking stations,” said the official.

In order to put to end various glitches caused by poor Internet network, Smart Bike Tech Private Limited, the agency managing the project, has decided to put in place a system which will enable a user to lock or unlock a cycle via Bluetooth besides the mobile phone Internet network.

Owing to network issues, users faced difficulty in operating cycles with the Smart Bike app. Sometimes, locks did not open despite repeated attempts or users were not able to lock bikes even as ride time kept running. Following complaints by users, the company had earlier put up boosters at some stations, but those, too, failed to address these issues.

From next month, the Hyderabad-based company will start the process of making the cycles run via Bluetooth and the system will be in place by mid-March. At present, a trial run of the same is going on.

“All cycles are already Bluetooth-enabled. We just need to make the system run. There were issues of network coverage, which affected the cycle operations. All cycles have GPS and it will work through Bluetooth,” said an official of the Smart City Mission.

At present, 2,500 bicycles are being provided at 310 docking stations across the city under the project. On August 12, 2021, the UT Administration had launched the first phase of the project, with 1,250 bicycles at 155 docking stations. There is a plan to take the count of bicycles to 5,000 and that of docking stations to 617.