Zophop is a mobile public transit assistant that aims to tackle all the pain points in urban transportation

Zophop is an app that aims to be “your private assistant for public transport”, and is created to address the various problems faced by commuters. The application has been around for three years now, and was launched in late 2014. It is available in 15 Indian cities, and has been downloaded over 3050,000 times. There are 60,000 active users of Zophop on a monthly basis. The application started off as a journey planner, but evolved to progressively address every pain point faced by a commuter. Zophop was started by Vinayak Bhavnani, the current CEO and Mohit Dubey who is the founder of Carwale. While Dubey was building Carwale, he realised that the it will only ever serve five to ten percent of the total population of India. The majority of the people in India commute by public transport, and very few people own cars. As a result, Dubey and Bhavnani got together and started Zophop with the intention of providing multimodal information and transactions services for public transportation. When Zophop started off, the initial version of the application focused on building a discovery platform, or a journey planner. A typical commute for an urban Indian includes travel through various modes of transport. In a large city such as Mumbai, this may involve a bus or a rickshaw ride to a station, and then journey by rail, and then a bus, taxi or a rickshaw ride again to their workplaces. [caption id=“attachment_386134” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] From left to right, Vinayak Bhavnani, CEO, Mohit Dubey, Co-Founder and Nikhil Aggarwal, COO and Co-Founder of Zophop[/caption] Zophop is envisioned as a single platform which can aggregate information on all modes of transit. This included buses, monorails, trains and cabs… one platform which holds all these modes together, and allows people to figure out the most effective mode of travel, or the travel itinerary from their locations to their destinations. Zophop COO Nikhi Aggarwal says, “Once we did that, we then realised that while this is important, the major pain point is telling people when the next bus is coming. For example, telling where the bus is and what is the ETA. So we started focusing our proposition, so this is how we evolved.” Realtime information on buses In India, there is very limited infrastructure to support the use case of providing realtime information of buses to the commuters. The Zophop team then started building this infrastructure, at times deploying their own GPS solutions as well. A campaign of data collection was initiated, and Zophop started monitoring the activity of the buses, predicting ETA and then feeding the information to the platform. “We started off as a journey planner and then moved to providing realtime information. Since the data does not exist, we decided to build the data,” Bhavnani says. The problem Zophop is trying to solve here is one of information. Knowing where the bus is, allows the commuters to make more informed decisions and manage their time better. Typically, if a passenger goes to a bus stop, there is no option but to wait till the bus arrives, whenever it does. There is no accurate indication available as to exactly when the bus will arrive. Usually, there are no printed schedules available. Even if schedules are available at bus stops or on the websites of the public transport body, they are usually on the lines of “every twenty minutes”. When the bus schedules with accurate timings are available, the buses are not exactly punctual owing to the notorious traffic conditions, particularly in congested urban areas through which most commuters navigate daily. Which is why the basic focus of the company is providing people with realtime information on buses. Zophop processes information from various sources to arrive at an Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA), which is delivered to the commuters through an application. The early attempts to provide real-time information of the buses depended on crowdsourced data. This was implemented in the home market of the founders, at Navi Mumbai. The founders quickly realised that crowdsourcing is not the best way to get consistent realtime information on buses unless done at scale Crowdsourcing does not provide sustainable and consistent data for very large volumes. There is still the capability in the application to crowdsource the data, but Zophop does not depend on that alone, and has instead implemented a number of its own solutions, just to answer one question – “when will the bus arrive at my stop?” The founders realised that there are a lot of buses in India that actually have a GPS tracker. Because of the Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission, there is a requirement that mandates that public transport buses are required to have GPS. Zophop built relationships with the public transport bodies to access the GPS data directly. Through that GPS data, the app was able to provide the people with the realtime information. However, there is more to it than just merely pulling the GPS data. The application estimates the ETA of buses that do not have a GPS tracker as well. Bhavnani explains, “When you talk about the consumer proposition of giving realtime information and ETA to the end consumer, so that they do not end up wasting their time on the route, there are two necessary components to solve that problem. One, is that there are GPS devices on the buses. That will give the realtime locations of all the vehicles that the GPS is installed on. The second piece of information which is equally essential is knowing which vehicle is on which route. To give you some context, when you are travelling in a bus, you will only search by route number. Let’s say route number 500 goes from A to B. You are interested when route number 500 reaches stop X. Now, which vehicle is on which route is essential to solve this problem. If you look at how routing happens, most of it is still on paper. You cannot build a system on top of it, and definitely not a real time system. To solve this, what we need to do in almost all cases, is to deploy scheduling software. In two cases we deployed a simple mobile app with the operators of these transport bodies. The app is distributed at various locations in the city. And they are taking decisions on which vehicles should go on which route, very dynamically, all throughout the day. A particular vehicle will be deployed on one route for a few hours, and then on another. We get all this information in realtime. They ask us to monitor this activity on a daily basis, so that we capture all the information in realtime, submit it to our servers, and this kind of information is combined with the GPS data, processed and used to predict the ETA. Once we have both the sets of data, we use traffic information to enhance the ETA. And we also have our own algorithms which takes into account how a bus travels. A bus which can have fifty stops, but there could be a bus which has just ten stops, how do you take this into account? We also use historical data that we have collected to sort of fine tune the ETA algorithm based on the route. All these inputs and knowledge on how buses operate is used for the final outcome, which is the ETA for the final customer. ” Aggarwal adds “How we do this is through installing or visualizing detailed data from the buses. Combining it with a few other inputs, our own proprietary algorithm, to calculate the eta, and provide it to consumers through a mobile interface. Like every internet or ecommerce company in India, we had to build the enterprise solutions. The data does not exist in a digital format. If you think of anything from Oyo Rooms to MakeMyTrip, everyone needed to partner with the enterprise to deploy software at the backend with the actual owners of inventory to convert the data into a digital format. We have made the same investment in public transport. The challenges on public transit are compounded because this is a very dynamic industry. Every bus does six to seven trips a day. If you talk about an organization like BEST, which has 3,000 plus buses, that is 18,000 trips every day. For every bus there are six staff members. So the staff size is also very large. Every bus does 180 km a day. So the quantum of operations and the requirement of realtime information is much more critical in public transit. Which is what makes it extremely complicated, but also extremely important to provide this information to consumers and to build this solution. As a result of all these efforts, we today have about 5,000 buses on our platform which are live. These are all intra city buses, not long distance buses. We are today the only platform in India which has any kind of live information on buses, through this solution. None of the other applications, including some of our global peers who operate, or even including Google, are able to provide live buses to consumers consistently and at this scale.” Zophop gives you a map, which is radar like view of all Live buses in your city, and their movement through nearby areas. This lets you pick between two choices for yourself, but Zophop can help you make a smarter decision using the power of computation. Planning multimodal journeys Real-time routing information is only one of the pain points addressed by Zophop. The second addresses the multimodal nature of most commutes. There are so many options and combinations available for a person to make a commute, and it impossible to process all this data. Additionally, even getting the basic information such as fares and timings for these various modes of transport requires juggling multiple applications and web pages. Zophop provides a simple interface that does the computation necessary to offer the fastest way to get to your destination. If you are not short of time, but are short of cash, then the application can also tell you about the cheapest way to get to your destination. At times, commuters can hit a jackpot, where the cheapest multimodal journey also turns out to be the fastest. Bhavnani says, “If you use our application, you will also get information about which platform the train is coming on. What is the cost of the journey, which includes the bus ticket, the train ticket and the auto fare. So we provide people with comprehensive information about the travel experience as well as the fare and time details.” We tested out the application for ourselves. For the cheapest journeys, it was pretty straightforward. It might take an hour or more longer than the fastest route, but was cheaper than we could possibly calculate after looking up the hard to navigate web pages of various local transportation services. However, for the fastest journey, the travel itinerary suggested by the application was not always so straightforward. A typical route would involve walking to a bus stop, going to the nearest railway station and catching another bus to get to the workplace. The fastest route typically involves more hops. It will cost you more, but it can shave off travel time. This varies between five minutes to more than twenty depending on the traffic conditions of that day. It is a surprising way to travel, but useful if you are in a hurry. It is unbelievable. A regular commuter would actually suspect the route that the app is offering. However, if you go by the application, you are likely to end up where you want to be faster. “When we released our first version, which was essentially a journey planner, this was a very common observation from our end. A lot of people who saw the results never believed it. That is the aim of the product. We realised there are so many options and so many combinations available, that it is impossible for a person to do all this in their minds. We take this away from you and give you the best possible option. Today again we are in the similar position. We are the only platform in India that gives you realtime information and the exact ETA. People are so used to scheduled timetables and static information, that they do not believe it. We are working hard to prove it to the consumers that this exists.” Future plans The next logical step is to provide a way for cashless transactions directly through the application. In some locations, you can book an Uber ride directly through the app. The team intends to add the capabilities of booking passes, bus tickets and train tickets directly from Zophop. The team intends to add live buses as well as integrating ticketing solutions for the top 12 cities in India. Aggarwal says, “Our main focus is to solve the problem of transit in India. There are around 200,000 to 300,000 buses in operation in the country. Over the next three to four years, we want to make sure that seventy to eighty percent of these buses are available on ZopHop. Our immideate focus is to take the number of buses we have on our platform from 5,000 to 20,000. Both, for realtime information and mobile ticketing. The first aim is to scale up the number of buses on the supply side. Obviously there are some product side improvements, efficiency improvements that we are focusing on. We have plan to add a few additional cities, which are among the top fifteen cities in India. We will probably be present in the top twelve cities by the end of the year. We want to be the public transit assistant for the commuters. If we get out of the house, and the choice of travel is public transit, they should think of Zophop. We will provide the information and the capabilities to transact.” Bhavnani says, “We see ourselves as a public transportation company. Trying to make public transport, or public transportation easier for millions and millions of Indians who travel every day. We want to solve some key problems in the market, especially for bus commuters. This is our focus for now.” Building a holistic solution for commuters One of the important factors in making an app successful in India is the availability of the application in local and regional languages. Zophop is available in Hindi, English, Marathi and Bengali for now. There are plans to add local language capabilities for every new city the application launches in. There are plans to add support for Gujarati and Kannada. Aggarwal says, “As a public transport solution, we have to cater to the people in the local language, so we will always do that.” The Smart Cities project and the demonetisation drive are aligned with the kind of solution that Zophop wants to offer. “Smart Cities project and demonetisation have both allowed us to scale up our operations. Increasingly, every city wants to have realtime information and mobile ticketing solutions provided to their customers. We are lucky from a time perspective where the kind of solutions we are building are very much the need of the hour. It has allowed us to ramp up the number of cities we are in,” Aggarwal says.

The Zophop team is adding safety features to the application. This will allow a commuter to invite another user to track his or her journey, in real time. The trip can be tracked across multiple modes of transport. Another feature geared towards how technologies and applications are used in India, is the ability to use a part of the application even when it is offline. Users who are conservative about their data usage, will find many of the core functionalities of the application available even in offline mode. Another pain point addressed by the application, is the need to ask the conductor when your stop has arrived. At times commuters have to request the conductor to remind them when their stop has arrived, and then depend on the memory of the conductor. The application can inform you of when your stop has arrived, as well as give voice alerts with information on the current stop, the next stop, and the estimated time required to reach your destination. The experience is similar to the alerts on a Metro, irrespective of which mode of transport you are in. The application is available in Mumbai, Bengaluru, New Delhi, Chennai, Jaipur, Chandigarh, Bhubaneshwar, Kolkata, Pune, Bhopal, Indore, Hyderabad, Nagpur, Vijaywada and Ahmedabad. If your city is not listed, you can request Zophop to be made available in your city here . The Live buses are available in Mumbai, Indore, Nagpur, and Kolkata. Even in a metropolitan city such as Mumbai, there is not enough information available for a commuter to plan a journey based on information available online. A trip to a destination may involve a rickshaw ride, a train journey, a walk, a ferry ride, another rickshaw ride, another ferry ride, and an ST bus journey where you have to ask the conductor to remind you when your bus stop comes, and finally a walk. This can be a terrible pain if the ticketing staff and the conductors are the only authorities with the relevant information. Zophop is adding information on Ferry rides to Mumbai soon. Zophop is free, and available for download on the Google Play Store.