How female bikers became the most popular taxi in Bangladesh (6 photos)

90% of women in Bangladesh said they are constantly harassed on public transport. Those who go to work and school every day admit that they simply live in hell. And these are not shy Japanese; in Bangladesh, “molesters” are more brazen and more impunity.





You can feel the hand of a Bangladeshi designer, is that SPEED drawn?

"For women and from women"

Therefore, a new application where you can order a motorcycle that will take you to the right place immediately began to receive 300 applications a day. But won't you have to hug the driver from behind? It’s okay, this is possible, because only girls ride the red motorcycles of this company.

The app is called Lily Ride, and every single driver here is a girl. The company did not even expect that it would immediately face such incredible demand, so there weren’t even enough drivers. They hired, it would seem, all the girls with licenses in the city, so they had to quickly send job candidates without licenses to driving courses.



Muslim women on bikes, sounds cool

Something without which the city was suffocating

The main and most stringent rule of the application is registration using a passport and personal ID. Only a girl can register and call such a motorcycle taxi.

After all, the issue is not only the safety of clients, but also that the girls are not called to a dark criminal area in the evening by men with bad intentions. This is a constant danger and responsibility for drivers, but the girls themselves do not want to leave for another job.





Like a desert raider from some Mad Max

Almost every one of them learned to ride a motorcycle after some traumatic experience with harassment in a taxi or bus. The motorcycle gave them peace of mind; leaving the house was no longer stressful and no longer expected to be humiliated. And they want other girls to feel this freedom too.

All biker girls ride red mopeds and wear red T-shirts. This is needed both as an identification mark for clients and as a protective, noticeable form. If the girl in red gets attacked, it will be easier to notice.



Red is the most popular color of motorcycles in Dhaka

I came up with all this... a man

Because he had money for the application. But Syed Saif was asked about this by his wife in 2017. The couple lived quite comfortably, but even in an expensive taxi, the taxi driver pestered the woman and wrote intimate messages to her using the number he got from the carrier.

The wife was so upset that she said that she would like to travel only with women. And that all her friends want exactly the same thing. Thus was born a business idea, which, due to social circumstances in the country, took off much more strongly than in any progressive country.



Girls can ride bicycles, but sometimes they are aggressively treated by radical religious men. Scary

Because in other countries, half of the women will choose a regular taxi, but here all the women wanted to “jump” to this women’s moto-taxi.

And also - it’s faster

The capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka, is an old city that is growing at a rapid, unhealthy rate. It has narrow streets and a million cars. That's why there are traffic jams here almost all day long.



Traffic in the city, everyone stands still, drink sellers walk between the rows

Compare, in 2004 the average speed of a car on city streets was 21.2 km/h, and ten years later it was 6.8 km/h. Today it is hardly more than four kilometers per hour. And motorcycles can maneuver in traffic jams, so everyone actively switches to them.

It turns out that women are not only safe, but they also find themselves in place faster than anyone else.

An unexpected ray of light against the backdrop of a depressing social problem.