Ryde Taps on Private-Hire Drivers to Deliver Items But The Authorities Said No

Imagine this. You left for work and suddenly, you realised that you’ve left a very important file at home.

And you have no time to go back for it.

GGWP.

Now, what if there’s a service that anybody can use, which will get the file from your home to your office. Without you going back.

And no, it’s not called Mummy service. You don’t get your mother to come to your office and embarrass you.

Believe it or not, there’s a company out there who wants to do this for you (though that’s not their main objective, but anyways).

RydeSend, Delivering Your Package Safely

Everybody knows Ryde, right? (Hey, that rhymes!)

Well, Ryde is now looking to go into the courier business and said they’re going to roll out RydeSend, an on-demand delivery service by 3 Sep 2018.

The first ride-hailing business to go into door-to-door courier services, Ryde guarantees that they are able to deliver smaller items like documents, flowers, properly packed meals and parcels within 60 minutes.

Yes. One. Hour.

Ryde has over 60,000 drivers. About 12,000 of their pool are private-hire drivers while the remaining drivers do carpools.

And if that’s not enough, RydeSend is working to incorporate 20,000 motorcyclists into their service by the end of the year.

Both senders and receivers will be able to track the location of their parcel, and the entire system is cashless with payment made through RydePay.

According to Ryde, this will also help drivers as well. During the off-peak hours where there are not many calls, drivers can choose to utilise RydeSEND to supplement their income.

It all sounds good, right?

Except everything was bought to a screeching halt after the Land Transport Authority (LTA) spoke up.

LTA Says Private Hire Drivers Cannot Do Courier Service

LTA has issued a warning against Ryde for its proposed courier service.

According to the LTA, “Public Service Vehicles such as taxis and private hire cars” are not allowed to carry goods only. And they’re “only meant to carry passengers for hire and reward.”

If drivers are found breaking this law, they might have their vocational licenses revoked.

In addition, Ryde didn’t seek LTA for approval for their proposed courier service.

Ang Hin Kee, the executive adviser of the National Private Hire Vehicles Association expressed disappointment at how Ryde is trying to rope private-hire drivers into doing delivery jobs.

But at the same time, he also mentioned that he urged LTA to review the current regulations last year. Similar to Ryde, he believed that “cabbies and private-hire drivers could have an extra income source by doing deliveries.”

In response, Ryde said that they’ll turn off the option of RydeSend for taxis and private-hire drivers in their app.

But honestly speaking, I think having items as passengers is much better than having humans as passengers #justsaying

Ryde Isn’t The First Company To Try Doing This

Now, if you didn’t remember, Ryde isn’t the first one to try and get drivers for delivery work.

In fact, Amazon Prime was the first one.

When Amazon Prime launched in Singapore, they faced a backlog of orders and did not have the logistics to complete the delivery orders. Which is bad considering they pride themselves on “ultra-fast” delivery.

Running out of vehicles, Amazon turned to the next best thing possible: booking taxis and tapping on freelance drivers to help fulfil delivery orders.

ComfortDelGro confirmed that they have bookings made by Amazon Prime.

But the difference between Amazon and Ryde is, Amazon had taxis ferry their parcels together with a passenger.

Not sure how that worked, but that was about a year ago. Pretty sure Amazon has solved their delivery problem.

But in any case, at least now we know that if we forget to bring our brain out to work, we can get RydeSend to deliver it to us.

Unless you’re like my colleague Leon lah, who doesn’t have a brain.