A free ride service for women and LGBT individuals will launch on Halloween.
Created by Collective Action for Safe Spaces, Right Rides will depend on volunteer drivers, navigators and dispatchers to give people who traditionally do not feel safe using public transportation free rides in three donated Zipcars. During the pilot stage of the program, the service will center around U Street NW and serve riders as far as Rock Creek Park and Bladensburg Road and South Dakota Avenue NE. The service area will initially not include the Southeast and Southwest quadrants of the city.
“We identified the need for RightRides through the numerous stories of late night sexual harassment and sexual assault that come up in the news and are submitted to our blog, including harassment assaults perpetrated by public transit workers and taxi drivers,” Julia Strange, the organization’s program and policy director, told DCist last year. “Though as an organization we recognize that culture change is the only way to truly eliminate sexual assault, we want to make sure that women and LGBTQ individuals have a safe and affordable transportation option home in the meantime.”
Interested volunteers, who need to be available from 11:30 p.m. to 3:30 a.m. on service days, should fill out an application here. Zosia Sztykowski, who is coordinating the program for CASS, said volunteers will undergo a background check and a screening by Zipcar.
On Halloween, rides will be available between midnight and 3 a.m. Because CASS cannot anticipate where riders will need to go, it’s difficult to estimate how many rides will be available. Riders can expect at least the driver or navigator to identify as a woman.
After October, CASS will send out a survey to the community to identify which holidays the service would be best for. Sztykowski said, even in the pilot phase, the group wants to make sure the service is “really useful and impactful for people.”
“We’re really hoping that once we get our sea legs,” Sztykowski said, “we’ll have a better idea of how much it’s gonna take us to get to places [not served initially] and hopefully extend the service to those places as soon as possible.”
