Back in 2018, I wrote a piece for The New Humanitarian’s specialised publication on women issues about a women-only motorcycle ride-sharing named Lily. It was launched a few months earlier on the admirably simple proposition that women might prefer being driven through Dhaka’s traffic by other women.

A university student told me discovering it was “like a dream come true.” Motorcycles were cheap and capable of squeezing through gaps in Dhaka traffic into which conventional vehicles could only gaze longingly.

Eight years later, the dream has gone wherever most promising Dhaka transport experiments eventually go…nowhere. Lily is no longer around. Other female-only transport ventures have appeared, been applauded, photographed and then vanished with the impressive punctuality that the vehicles themselves rarely achieved.

Meanwhile, women have continued entering universities and workplaces, apparently without consulting the transport system first.

This has produced one of those absurd Dhaka arrangements in which economic modernity must commute using infrastructure designed for another century. Women work in banks, hospitals, factories, universities, newsrooms and technology companies. Then at 9 am and 5 pm they emerge as contestants in a daily physical examination involving overcrowded buses, wandering hands, strategic elbows and the ancient Dhaka ritual of wondering whether an approaching bus will stop at all.

Those who can afford it buy cars or summon ride-sharing vehicles. Those who cannot pay what might be called the female mobility tax…extra money, extra waiting, longer routes, curtailed working hours and the constant calculation of whether getting somewhere is worth the trouble. Researchers have given these respectable academic names such as the “mobility of fear” and “mobility tax”. Bangladeshi women require no footnotes to understand either.

Into this enters the new government’s Pink Bus.

The Bangladesh Road Transport Corporation has launched 14 women-only buses, operated by 15 female drivers and 24 female conductors, across routes in Dhaka, Narayanganj, Gazipur, Bogura and Chattogram. The government plans eventually to add 100 electric buses, with the first 50 expected within three months.

This is, by almost any practical measure, a good thing. Naturally, therefore, we must argue about whether it is feminist.

The controversy begins with segregation. Some women’s-rights activists understandably ask why women should require separate buses at all. Equality, after all, presumably means being able to board an ordinary bus without needing a specially painted refuge from the male population. If men harass women on buses, why redesign women’s transport rather than men’s behaviour?

It is a serious objection. It also collides rather violently with the bus stop.

The theoretical woman has every right to travel safely on every bus in Bangladesh. The actual woman standing at Farmgate at 7:30 pm may reasonably prefer a vehicle in which this magnificent constitutional principle has already been implemented.

This is the eternal quarrel between feminism as destination and feminism as transport policy. One asks what society ought to look like. The other asks how a woman gets home tonight. Then there is the pink.

One might have imagined that the important breakthrough was women driving enormous public buses through streets where many male drivers regard lane markings as Western cultural imperialism. Instead, some discussion has focused on the drivers wearing pink hijabs.

Here Bangladesh has achieved something almost artistic. Women are driving buses professionally — occupying an overwhelmingly male profession, commanding large vehicles, earning money and literally sitting in the driver’s seat — and we have managed to wonder whether their headscarves are insufficiently feminist.

The hijab complicates the imagery for a certain school of feminism because Bangladesh is majority Muslim and pink-hijabed female drivers do not resemble the standard visual vocabulary of emancipation. Yet perhaps feminism becomes rather less useful when it requires women to look liberated according to somebody else’s dress code.

A woman driving a bus while wearing a hijab is still driving the bus. The steering wheel does not become patriarchal because her hair is covered. The stronger criticism concerns what happens outside the pink buses.

Fourteen buses cannot emancipate millions of commuters. A Pink Bus can provide a safe journey to the women fortunate enough to catch it; it cannot absolve the state from making every other bus safe. As The Daily Star newspaper has sensibly asked: what happens when the buses are not pink?

There is international evidence for caution. A study of women-only Pink Buses in Lahore found that passengers felt safer aboard them, but limited availability meant the service failed to meet users’ broader needs. Long waits themselves created safety problems, and women frequently took ordinary transport rather than wait indefinitely for the correct-coloured bus.

Bangladesh has encountered precisely this problem before. Earlier BRTC women-only buses and the private Dolonchapa service were radically scaled back despite rising demand. In 2022, one Dhaka commuter explained that taking Uber daily could consume virtually her salary. She preferred women-only buses, when she could actually find one.

That is the real test of the Pink Bus. Not whether its shade satisfies feminist theory, nor whether its drivers dress according to the preferred ‘iconography’ of metropolitan progressivism, but whether the buses are still running in 2028. Dhaka does not suffer from a shortage of pilot projects. It suffers from pilots becoming memorials.

The Pink Bus should therefore be treated neither as feminist salvation nor patriarchal segregation. It is an emergency response to a transport system that has failed women particularly badly. If it makes commuting safer, expands women’s employment — including behind the wheel — and gives working women a cheaper alternative to private cars, it deserves support.

But success would ultimately make the Pink Bus less necessary, not more.

The feminist city is not one in which every woman waits for a pink vehicle. It is one in which she can board the green, blue, red or battered unidentifiable bus that arrives first without calculating where to stand, whom to avoid, what time she must return home or how much safety she can afford.

Until Dhaka becomes that city, however, there is something wonderfully pointless about telling women that a separate bus represents imperfect liberation. They already know.

They would simply like to get to work.

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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa