Residents of the modern residential areas of BSD City in South Tangerang, Banten, now have a new option to get around with the recent launch of an electric scooter service as part of the smart city concept.

The service, called GrabWheels, is being offered by Southeast Asian ride hailing company Grab.

Officially launched on Thursday, the two-wheel vehicle has been available for use as part of a free trial since Monday at the Green Office Park in BSD City. Even though the Grab app already offers car to ojek (motorcycle taxi) services, the new scooter service is currently available as a standalone application that will be integrated with the main app sometime in the future.

App users can rent the electric scooters by scanning the barcode on the vehicles’ parking spots with their smartphones.

There are currently five GrabWheels parking spots in the office park compound with 10 e-scooters provided in each parking spot.

The new scooters, which follow similar services in Singapore and the Philippines, have attracted interest from locals and employees at the office complex alike.

One of them was Andrean Wangsa, a 19-year-old university student, who said that he was excited about the arrival of the new mode of transportation.

With two friends, Andrean used the e-scooter for the first time on Tuesday. He and his friends took a ride around the area for 20 minutes before returning the scooter to the original parking spot.

“It was a fun ride. I really liked it. [Grab] should also make them available at universities so that students can easily move from one building to another,” Andrean told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday after scanning the barcode to end the trip.

Riders are only allowed to ride the e-scooters for a maximum of 30 minutes within the Green Office Park compound. When their times up, the app will inform them of the nearest parking spot to return the scooter. At the end of everyday, Grab employees collect, recharge and store the two-wheeled vehicles.

As the scooter’s maximum speed was set at 15 kilometers per hour, it was not compulsory to have transportation service permits from the Transportation Ministry, Grab’s executive director Ongki Kurinawan said.

He said that although the service was currently only available in BSD City, the service was aimed at providing close-range transportation.

“GrabWheels is certainly one of the unique modes of transportation. It can be used to travel around 3 to 5 km,” he said during the launch on Thursday.

Ongki said Grab Indonesia had not decided on the fee yet as it would conduct the trial of the new service for several weeks. He also could not provide details on when fees would be imposed, but said the payment method would be cashless.

For comparison, in Singapore, e-scooter riders are charged SG$0.20 (US$0.15) per 30 minutes via GrabPay. Meanwhile, in Manila the service is currently offered free of charge as it is also still in a trial phase.

Ongki went on to explain that the service at BSD City was available from 10 a.m. until 8 p.m. However, users are not allowed to use the service during rain for safety reasons.

He claimed that at least 100 users had used GrabWheels each day since the trial phase began on Monday.

Grab and Sinar Mas Land have plans to expand GrabWheels to other areas of BSD City, and to other private townships developed by the property developer.

The service comes after an agreement between the two companies on March 4 to provide smart mobility solutions for integrated smart digital city development.

“We hope the GrabWheels service will help make the transportation system in BSD City more innovative and integrated,” Irawan Harahap, digital hub project leader at Sinar Mas Land, said. (das)

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