Laudrive: a taxi for women?
A Mexican company has developed an app to prevent cases like Mara Castilla’s murder from happening again
Laudrive is the preferred application by women to transport themselves in Mexico City, because of the violence that occurs against those who used to ride Uber or Cabify. They prefer Laudrive because this application is only for women for their safety and tranquility. Also, applications like Laudrive give more opportunities to the Mexican women on the working market that is currently so competitive, because the drivers are also women.
The application has had an exponential growth: downloads increased 600% since it launch the past March 1st on Android, and it is also available for iOs. Also the job opportunities with the platform increased 200%.
Sadly to get the service you have to ask for it 20 minutes in advance. Many female users expressed that one of the disadvantages with the shortage of units, this happened because until July from 2017, the service counted with at least 600 female drivers, called ¨Laudys¨, because of this the waiting time and the probability of the service cancellation is high. Especially in the night, when there should be more units, since the Laudys do not like to drive when it is dark for safety reasons. This is something that the company wants to improve.
The need for an app like Laudrive stems from news like the murder of Mara Castilla, who was violated and strangled after getting in a Cabify car, this past September 8th . According to Luis Fernando Montes de Oca the founder of Laudrive, he comments that despite the higher price between a 15 and 20% in comparison to Uber or Cabify, what they are selling is trust and safety for the female users.
Montes de Oca with his three partners had the idea of creating this application because of all the violence against women that has happened. Women prefer the safety of having another woman driving, he says ¨The female drivers told them that a lot of users wanted to call them after the first ride with a woman as a driver. This is how we identify a problem¨. To offer safety to the female affiliates, Laudrive counts with a monitoring service that work day and night.
As mentioned above this application is exclusive for women, but there is also an option to travel with a man either the husband, the son (older than 12), boyfriend, father or any male companion. To do this the female users will have use the service more than 20 times, to raise to the level 2 of trust, which give them this additional benefit, although just only applies to one male companion.
Laudrive functions only in Mexico City, but they plan on expanding to other parts of the country. It is expected that in December the application will start to work in Monterrey, Guadalajara, and Puebla. Montes de Oca says that “The people writes to us from many places asking what can they do to make us arrive to other cities”. Not only is this application important for women, says Montes de Oca, but also for the men that are worried for the women that are important for them, and for their safety.
Latin American Post | Juan David Cárdenas Leal
Copy edited by Laura Rocha Rueda
