Metro Rail tickets can now be booked via Uber mobile app

Chennai Metro Rail commuters who book their tickets through Uber mobile app will get a 50% discount for a month. Additionally, those who book a ride to or from Metro Rail stations, on Uber Auto or Uber Moto, will get another 50% off up to ₹20.

During the launch of this initiative, M.A. Siddique, managing director of Chennai Metro Rail Limited, said the move would benefit thousands of passengers. “They get one more option of buying a ticket. We want the tickets to be available on as many platforms as possible for the convenience of commuters. We are expanding rapidly, and will change the way people commute in Chennai,” he said.

Manikandan Thangarathnam, senior director, mobility and platforms, Uber, said this was a crucial step towards creating a seamless multimodal integration. “For a passenger, metro is only one leg of his journey. To come to the station, they walk or take an auto. But now we can cover the first and second leg of the journey [in one click with a single payment]. This [move] builds the foundation for people to plan the journey in a single click. That’s the experience we want to create,” he said.

However, he said that they had to solve some real time variables such as traffic, availability of vehicles, and weather, which determined the time and pricing, and it involved a lot of machine learning and AI algorithms.