I Got Lost in Chennai. Then I Built RideHub.

There's a specific kind of helplessness that hits you in a new city.

Not danger. Not fear. Just friction. Every small thing costs you more effort than it should. Which bus? Which app? Is this auto fare fair? Is there a faster route I'm completely missing?

That was me in Chennai with my family.

We weren't unprepared travelers. But Chennai, coming from North India, felt like a different world of transit. And here's the irony that still gets me: Chennai has one of the most well-structured public transport systems in India. The CMBT Chennai Mofussil Bus Terminus is one of Asia's largest bus terminals. Regulated buses. Structured routes. Metro connectivity. The infrastructure was genuinely impressive.

And yet, we still struggled. Every day.

So the problem wasn't the infrastructure. It was access to it.

The App We Found Too Late

A few days into our trip, just before my family was leaving, someone mentioned Chalo.

We opened it. Bus routes. Real-time tracking. Live commute info.

And my immediate, gut reaction wasn't relief. It was something closer to frustration.

Why did we find this now?

That question didn't leave me. I started digging. Does every city have something like this? Turns out, yes, sort of.

Bengaluru has Namma Yatri. Some states have metro apps. Others have bus ticketing platforms. Regional ride-hailing options. Auto-booking tools.

Every city had something. But none of it talked to each other. You'd need four different apps just to figure out how to get across town in an unfamiliar place.

That's when the idea clicked: India doesn't have a transport problem. It has a transport unification problem.

What RideHub Actually Is

The question I kept coming back to was simple: What's the best possible way for me to reach somewhere right now?

Not just fastest. Not just cheapest. Sometimes you want public transport. Sometimes you need to avoid traffic. Sometimes you're a tourist who has no idea where to even begin.

RideHub was my attempt to answer that question: one platform that aggregates everything. Buses, cabs, metro, autos, mixed routes, and surfaces the right option based on what you actually need in that moment.

Not another transport app. A layer on top of all of them.

What Building It Actually Taught Me

I started during my second-year summer vacation. No team, no funding, no startup pitch. Just a problem I couldn't stop thinking about.

The hardest part wasn't writing code. It was realizing how fragmented everything is underneath.

Different cities use different APIs. Some systems are well-documented. Some barely have a public integration layer. Some are modern; some feel like they were designed in a different era entirely.

At some point I stopped thinking like a developer and started thinking like a city planner trying to untangle decades of independently built systems.

That shift from builder to systems thinker was probably the most valuable thing RideHub gave me.

Who This Is Really For

Transport apps mostly help people who already know their city.

The people who need help most are the ones who don't: students moving cities for the first time, elderly passengers navigating unfamiliar transit, tourists, families, people who don't speak the local language.

These users don't just need a ride. They need confidence that they're making the right choice.

That's a different design problem entirely.

I never formally launched RideHub. No pitch competitions, no investor meetings. Partly because I kept wanting it to be better. Partly because some ideas feel personal before they feel ready.

But I still genuinely believe transport aggregation in India is one of the most important unsolved problems in urban tech. Metro systems are expanding. EVs are coming. Unified ticketing is being discussed.

The infrastructure is getting built. What's missing is the layer that ties it all together that makes an unfamiliar city feel, just a little bit, like home.

That's what RideHub was always trying to be.