Every morning as Yantrick leaves for work, Kathmandu’s traffic does its best to discourage her from taking the bus. At rush hour 750,000 vehicles claim first-come rights on any strip of tarmac, compelling her to hail down a cab and be taken for a ride again and again.
Well, Appli Kali’s Taxi Fares Nepal is here to save our lunch money. The app designed by a group of Nepali software engineers does just what its name suggests – calculates the fare from your starting point to your destination in the Valley. If the fact that its website is down because of high traffic is any indication, it seems Kathmandu’s crawlers have long been waiting for an app of this kind.
The app is very minimal and, owing to its small size, loads almost instantly. At the first interface you are asked to choose where you are taking your taxi from, where you want to end up, and bam, you have the bill on your palm before you even step into a cab.
On the bottom of the screen, an information button shows you the current authorised rates for day-time and after-hours. Clicking on the policeman icon gives you an option to send complaints to Kathmandu Metropolitan Traffic Office via SMS.
But the most impressive feature of the app is a route simulator that takes advantage of Google maps to find out the fare from point A to point B, lets you zoom in and out, and set markers for both points. There’s plenty of room for improvement though, because the shortest route can sometimes guide you wrongly through a one-way street or a normal ride through town will take a Ring Road detour.
Another fault its makers will surely better in coming days: a shortage of options in the start and destination boxes. Ideally you should be able to go to and from anywhere in Kathmandu, but this isn’t the case. For example, if you select ‘Airport International’ as your starting point you can only choose, for some reason, ‘Naya Bus Park’ as your end point. Bizarre, really. When Yantrick took a taxi to Patan Dhoka, the app got lost before we even made it to Bagmati Bridge!
Minor glitches aside, the greatest thing about this app is that users can finally calculate the exact distance of their rides and do the math without worrying about whether taxi drivers are ripping them off. From her experience, Yantrick has found out older drivers will agree to go by untinkered meter and it’s usually the younger ones who have the nerve to be reckless.
The app is available on both Android’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store and will take less than a minute to download (absolutely free).
Yantrick’s verdict: It’s still early days, but at least with this app you can find out an approximate fare before you even hit the road.