Last Updated on 2023-06-20 , 8:22 am
You’ve heard of drivers offering illegal hitch rides from Telegram.
But what about riders (yes, riders riding motorbikes) offering illegal hitch rides from Telegram, too?
This is real, and I can almost see your reaction now:
Food Delivery Riders Are Offering Hitch Rides Illegally via Telegram
If you simply do a search on Telegram with the words “SG BIKE”, you’d see this:
Who’d have thought there’s such a market.
In fact, there appears to be a large market: a simple scroll would reveal that there are many pillions (i.e. passengers) looking for bikers, with most of them having no helmet.
Most of them were asking for bikers immediately, with some asking for bikers one or two hours later.
The first group has well over 37K members, and a quick count shows that from about 830 am to 930 am on a Sunday rainy morning (probably the worst time for a bike ride, too), there were about six requests in that group.
According to The Straits Times, there are about nine groups with over 300,000 members in total.
They also tried to “book” ten rides, and each ride costing between $10 to $15 for a 15-minute ride. The pairing was fast, too: in some cases, riders responded within two minutes.
And here’s the thing: out of the ten they contacted, eight of them were food delivery riders, with five of them appearing with the familiar food delivery thermal bag. However, none of them wore their uniform.
The riders claimed that they were doing this to supplement their income
In the “experiment”, it’s revealed that it wasn’t something that you probably want to do: a rider ran a red light, another rider rode like he was in a race and even scrolled through his phone while riding, and another just stopped in the middle of a busy road to check for directions on his phone.
This, of course, shows why the taxi and private-hire car industry is so heavily regulated.
When asked about this, LTA said, “Motorcycles are not allowed to be used to convey passengers for hire and reward.”
As for cars, carpooling is only legal through regulated platforms like RYDE or GrabHitch.
For bikes? The only thing that can be “conveyed” is your bak chor mee.
Here’s a simplified summary of the South Korea martial law that even a 5-year-old would understand:
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