The last mile is a cycle

The last mile is the shortest and most expensive part of an Indian commute. A metro train can move a person thirty kilometres for twenty rupees; the three kilometres from the station to the house cost ten, and they are the three kilometres that decide whether the train was worth taking.

That distance is covered, in most Indian cities, by a vehicle that is legally a cycle and financially an asset. It has three wheels, a canopy, a bench for four and a motor capped at 25 kilometres an hour — which is why it is not treated as a motor vehicle in the ordinary sense, and why it is allowed to do the one thing a bus cannot: wait at the gate.

The substitution

Until about 2010 the job was done by a cycle rickshaw, pedalled by a man who usually owned it. Then the lead-acid battery became cheap enough, and within a decade the pedalling stopped. The vehicle did not change shape: same chassis, same canopy, same bench, same route from the station gate to the colony. Only the legs were replaced.

The law arrived after the vehicles did, and it arrived backwards. In July 2014 the Delhi High Court stopped them from plying, on the grounds that they were unregistered, uninsured and unpermitted. The transport ministry then wrote them into the Motor Vehicles Act rather than out of it — a new category, a power ceiling, a speed ceiling, four passengers, a driving licence, a badge, and a registration series of their own. The rules were not designed for the vehicle. They were fitted to it, in about eight months, because several hundred thousand people were already earning a living with it.

What the rules did, incidentally, was fix the market. A 25-kilometre-an-hour ceiling keeps the e-rickshaw out of the traffic lanes and out of competition with the bus: it can only serve the short trip. In Delhi, 236 arterial roads are closed to it altogether. So the vehicle is legally confined to precisely the distance it is economically good at, which is a rare piece of coherence, and it means the fare can never be more than a short trip is worth.

The driver stopped owning the vehicle

This is the part that is usually left out of the story about electric mobility. A cycle rickshaw cost about ten thousand rupees. A man could save for it, or borrow from a moneylender, and then he owned his working day. An e-rickshaw costs seventy thousand to a lakh and a half, and the working poor do not have that. So the vehicle was bought by somebody with capital and rented out by the day.

The numbers are consistent across every account from Delhi. Rent, three to four hundred rupees a day. Gross collection, four to six hundred. Which leaves the driver two to three hundred for a shift of ten or twelve hours, out of which come his food, his room and whatever his family needs. The man who rents out ten vehicles, by one dealer's own account, clears thirty to forty-five thousand a month after paying for the charging.

This is not a story about a wicked landlord. It is what happens whenever the capital cost of a tool rises faster than the worker's ability to borrow: the ownership of the tool separates from the work, and the rent becomes the largest single line in the worker's day. The same thing happened to the auto-rickshaw, to the taxi, and to the sewing machine. The technology changes; the arrangement reasserts itself.

Why the fare did not fall

Running an e-rickshaw costs a fraction of pedalling one, so the obvious prediction was that the ride would get cheaper. It did not, and the reason is that a fare is not set by cost. It is set by the queue.

At any metro station exit there are more vehicles than passengers at most hours of the day, because entering the trade requires no capital — only a daily rent. When supply can expand without a deposit, it expands until the marginal driver is earning just enough to keep coming back. The passenger pays what the tenth vehicle in the queue will accept, and the tenth vehicle will accept almost anything, because the rent is due whether he drives or not. The saving from the battery does not go to the passenger or to the driver. It goes to whoever owns the asset, and it shows up as the rent.

The queue explains two other things that puzzle observers. It explains why drivers fight over stands and why stands get captured by unions: the position in the queue is the only variable a driver controls. And it explains why enforcement is so heavy and so resented — sixty-one thousand challans in a single year in Delhi, most of them for being outside the permitted area. A driver who has paid the rent before his first passenger has no capacity to absorb a fine, which is why the fine gets paid in the currency of the next two days' meals.

The fuel is a wall socket

There is a physical detail that keeps the economics honest. A lead-acid pack is the heaviest single component of the vehicle, and it has to be charged every day, usually overnight, usually from a domestic connection in a rented room. The driver's fuel station is his landlord's meter. Where the vehicle is rented, the owner often charges it at his own house and folds the cost into the rent; where it is owned, the driver negotiates with a landlord about how many units he may draw.

Lithium packs and swapping are now changing this, and the cost per kilometre is falling again — for the third time in fifteen years, if you count the legs. The fare will not follow, for the reason already given: the constraint is the queue and the rent, not the tank. What would change the fare is a change in who owns the vehicle, or a bus frequent enough to shorten the queue. Neither is a battery problem.

The three hundred metres

The last mile is where a city's arithmetic is most visible, because everything in it is small: a ten-rupee fare, a three-hundred-rupee rent, a queue of twelve vehicles for four passengers. It is also the part of the transport system that no plan draws, because it is too short to appear on a map and too cheap to appear in a budget.

And it is worth being precise about what the electric rickshaw achieved. It removed one of the hardest jobs in the city — a man pulling two people and a hundred kilos through traffic in forty degrees — and it did so within a decade, without a subsidy large enough to matter and without a plan. That is a genuine improvement in how a day is spent, and it happened because the technology suited the fare and the fare suited the trip.

What it did not do was change who keeps the money. The vehicle got better; the arrangement stayed exactly where it was. Which is the ordinary pattern here: the thing that visibly modernises is the machine, and the thing that quietly does not is the rent.

This is entry 11 of Everyday Life in About India. The pillar's argument — that the day is organised by logistics — is set out on the pillar page.