Festive Rush: Shoppers and cab drivers at odds

Shoppers refrain from taking their cars to avoid parking hassles, but end up ruing since cab drivers often refuse to pick them up from exact location due to excessive crowd in the market. Cab drivers on the other hand share their set of woes created by riders who refuse to budge!

New Delhi Markets in Delhi-NCR are flooded with shoppers, who are thronging these places for crazy deals and gifts this festive season. And after feeling accomplished post a good session of bargaining, buyers emerge from these bustling markets only to face a nightmare to navigate through the crowds and get into the cab to reach home. Holding innumerable shopping bags, as soon as the denizens take to their phones to find their cabbies, the tussle thus begins. While the shoppers find it cumbersome to lug around their bags, cab drivers demand them to walk to out of the markets to be able to manoeuvre their vehicles easily.

As Delhi markets get bustling during festivities, shoppers and cab drivers find themselves in a tussle over pick up and drop locations. (Photo: Raajessh Kashyap/HT)

“After hours of festive shopping in Kamala Nagar, I booked a cab for home. Three drivers cancelled the cabs, I’m assuming due to the festival rush, and 15 minutes later one driver arrived. But less than half way into the trip, we found ourselves stuck in a massive traffic jam and the cabbie asked me and my sister to get off and refused to continue the trip even though this meant he would have had to pay a penalty out of his pocket,” says Princy Malhotra, a Delhi University student, who finally found another cab after 30 minutes of waiting on a jam packed road and could make it home only after 1.5 hours. “On a regular day, my home is just 30 minutes away from the market,” she adds.

And the story is the same in the entire city, which has led to the residents and cab drivers being at loggerheads. Kritika Kaushik, a resident of Pitampura, shares that while shopping in Greater Kailash M block market with her mother-in-law, the cab driver “took his own sweet time to reach the pick up point”, after one driver had already declined to go to her pick-up location. “Coming back from GK M block market, a cab driver accepted our trip and demanded that we come outside to board the cab. We had shopped so much that it was difficult to carry all that stuff, but we didn’t have much choice. We asked him to wait for five to 10 minutes only to help him to not to get stuck in the traffic. But he didn’t want to wait, and started throwing tantrums. I didn’t take my car to avoid the parking stress, but this cab drama was too much to handle,” she recalls.

Renu Mittal, a homemaker from Paschim Vihar, shares, “I wanted to go shopping in Sadar Bazar and took a cab but the driver refused to go any further as soon as he spotted the rush in the market. Of course, it was crowded, but how can he say from 1km afar, ‘Madam better hoga agar aap yahi utar jao aur walk kar lo market tak. Agar mujhe pata hota aapko yahan aana hai toh trip accept hi nahi karta!’ My friend and I had no choice then but to get off and walk. We took a cab for our convenience, but it was of no use. Then, on our way back home, we decided to take an auto rickshaw. That was a much better decision.”

Riders are complaining of having to wait for long, battle multiple cancellations and lugging shopping bags through festive crowds to get a cab home. (Photo: Raajessh Kashyap/HT)

The cab drivers have their own set of woes, especially in the festive season when roads are jam-packed. Santosh, a cab driver rues that out of 10 trips, at least six are from or to a market. He says, “Women are either coming back after shopping or want to go to Karol Bagh or Lajpat or Chandni Chowk. And market mein leke jana ya wahan se nikalna koi mazaak nahi hai! People insist, ‘Bhaiya, market ke andar aao’ par aap batao itne rush mein kaise andar tak jayenge... isiliye cancel karna padta hai. Thoda toh unko bhi location se aage aana padega na!”

Amit, who works as a driver-partner with a cab aggregator, opines, “Kitni baar ladai hoti hai isi baat pe. Par sabko lagta hai ki jo cab book kar raha hai wohi theek hai. Koi nahi sochta ki sometimes we have to take two-kilometre-long U-turns because people have issues crossing the road. And all this gets worse iss festival time pe. But humein toh apna kaam karna hai. People don’t understand our trouble driving through a bhari hui market. Riders often ask us to stop here and there during the trip so they can run errands, but when we have to refuel with CNG, tab sab nakhrae karte hain aur darate hain ki low ratings de denge.”

“Is sab se toh achha hai ki tyoharon ke time pe outstation ki booking mil jaye,” says Sachin Gautam, another cab driver, and adds, “Market ki galiyon mein phas jaana kisko pasand hai! Vaise toh yahan 12 mahine rush rehta hai, but Diwali aur Bhai Dooj se pehle haalat aur kharab hoti hai.”

Narrating an unpleasant experience, he shares, “Abhi ek ne cab book kari, and reaching inside the market obviously took me some time. Jab tak main struggle kar ke pahuncha, rider ne cancel karke dusri cab bula li. How unfair! Humare bare mein toh koi sochta hi nahi hai.”

Author tweets @siddhijainn

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