Women’s safety in taxis has become a concern in recent years. Of course, safety for all taxi app users is essential. Women are more at risk and drivers may perceive them as easy targets. Theft, harassment, and lewd behavior are some situations that female users are subjected to during taxi rides. Knowing this, driver-made crimes against women are on the rise!
As a taxi service app owner, how can you avoid such instances throughout the course of your business operations? Easy, by preparing for them and preventing them before they have a chance to happen!
Why Integrating Safety Measures During Uber Clone App Development Is Important?
To avoid such occurrences which will harm your business, you must plan ways to prevent encountering such problems. Failure to do this will lead to the number of women rejecting your Uber clone app. Meaning a loss of business, revenue and these women may move on to use your competitor’s app!
The only way to avoid this from happening is to incorporate safety features for women during development itself. But allowing women to get help in peril is not enough. Help needs to arrive fast enough to catch and punish the perpetrator, or even better, avoid any chance of it happening, right?
Safety Model For A Taxi Service App
Why can’t rescue arrive in a matter of minutes as well? So, you can implement a safety mechanism based on app-based taxi services. Let’s first take a look at the regular taxi system almost all taxi services use.
It takes your taxi services a matter of minutes to assign a taxi to your user when a booking is made. How is this possible? Well, these apps make users enter their current location. Next, the app uses GPS to locate all of the locations of the drivers.
Sometimes taxis that are geographically closer cannot always reach the user faster due to high traffic or bad roads. So, naturally, the app will select the closest driver that has the least traffic to reach the user. This is exactly why users don’t have to wait for more than a few minutes for their commute to arrive at their location.
Wouldn’t it be great if the same mechanism could be used to apply help to women app users who require it? It definitely would be. But, you must be wondering how would that model work exactly? Simply the same way that taxi allotment works.
It is possible but one problem remains. How will the women request help? An easy, fast, and discrete method of alarming the rescue group is essential. One way of doing this is by introducing a ‘shake to alert’ feature. This way even if the phone drops, is shaken, or thrown during a struggle, a help request is sent.
How It Works
You might have confusion as to how this would work. Let’s explain the full process.
- A woman places a booking on your taxi service app, she enters her exact current location and the desired destination she wishes to arrive at.
- The taxi arrives and she gets in. Suppose, halfway to the destination, the driver strays from the route or starts hassling the woman. The woman shakes the phone to alert rescue teams.
- Immediately, a control room receives a notification alerting them to the phone’s location and the request for help.
- The control room will then call the user to confirm that it is legitimate and not accidental or a prank. If the user picks up and says it was an accident, the control room closes the request.
- If no one answers the confirmation call, the center assumes it as a rescue call. Immediately, the control room sends a few of the closest drivers to the last known location of the user. Location is retrieved on a GPS-based delivery system service. This will take a few minutes and the commuter can be rescued before a crime can be committed.
- As an incentive the first driver to arrive and save the woman can be given a reward to motivate drivers for future rescue missions.
- Using the same mechanism, you can also make sure nearby police patrol units are alerted to the incident.
Features For Women Safety In Taxis
What are other ways to make your Uber clone app safer for women to use? There are a few things to do and they must be added during Uber clone app development itself. This will create a safe environment that will make women want to use your app instead of another app.
Shake to Alert Feature
Using a panic button feature may not allow a distressed user to access it fast enough without the aggressor’s knowledge. That’s why a shake to alert feature is a better solution for alerting authorities.
Even accidentally, you will be able to send a request for help. For instance, while scuffling with the driver the woman can drop the phone making it appear like an accident. Perhaps the request can be used to track the taxi location, after all, it is an online trackable taxi service!
Driver Credentials
To make sure no repeated offenses are committed, you must keep track of drivers that are creating these safety risks for your users. You can do this by making note of drivers that are responsible for shady and sketchy behavior.
Allowing riders (especially women) to give feedback will be a great way to learn the patterns and behavior of drivers. Drivers with multiple complaints should not still be employed!
GPS Location
Because of in-built GPS requirements, you can keep track of where users and drivers are at any point in time. Of course, it needs to be made clear that this information is only used in emergency situations.
But, all app-based taxis should be made to know that their locations can be determined at any instant. This will help to ward off any drivers from straying from their standard protocols.
Shareable Taxi Location
As a rule of thumb, you should make sure every taxi under your services is an online trackable taxi. This is for safety purposes. Trackability helps to ascertain a taxi’s location in cases where drivers have detoured from their route.
It makes a rescue that much easier when the location of the rider cannot be made available. Knowing which taxi the rider is in helps to track the taxi location instead of the rider location.
Conclusion
Regardless of how good and efficient your Uber clone app services are, any shortcomings will impact your success. It just takes one incident to create a negative image in the minds of your users. Remember, a bad name sticks forever and you’ll want to try everything to avoid this.
To combat crime and avoid losing engagement from users, mostly women, you must prevent the chances of crimes against female riders. While this is just the beginning of this feature, it definitely has room for improvement. Either way, it is best to have a few safety features in your taxi services app instead of none!
Lastly, it is important to make sure these features are backed by a capable team of rescuers and operations room. These rescuers need to be ready at all times in case a call is made that requires their help.
