Women2Drive campaign faced roadblock due to few risk takers

Women2Drive campaign faced roadblock due to few risk takers

A Facebook campaign that urged Saudi women to drive in a bid to overturn a ban on female motorists was a failure, according to  local media. Traffic police say no one was arrested and there were no accidents reported on June 17.

“The traffic police did not expect women to drive on Friday and not one ticket was issued for women that day,” said a Makkah province police source.

The campaign urged women who drove on the day to upload videos of them driving.

A Saudi woman living in Riyadh uploaded a clip of her driving to the supermarket at 12.45 p.m. the same day. “We just want to run our lives by ourselves. We don’t need to be driven around. We need to go to work, shop and run errands without having to rely on drivers,” she said in the video.

The campaign was deemed a failure as hardly any women drove that day despite the amount of support for the initiative.

“There were only 40 women who drove in the Kingdom. We expected more,” said Bayan Essam, one of the women supporting the cause.

“I believe the reason behind that is because only a few women know how to drive and there are even fewer who actually have international driving licenses.”

Columnist at Al-Watan newspaper and professor of linguistics at the girls’ college of King Abdulaziz University, Amira Kashgari, also drove her car in Jeddah.

A group of young men told Arab News they were ready to report any women driving to the police. “We will take pictures of them and give the police their number plates and the time and place where they drove,” said Hattan Abu Ras, one of the men. “Those women are going against Shariah and the Supreme Council of Senior Religious Scholars, and we are going to do anything to keep them off the streets.” The initiative is ludicrous according to Abdullah Al-Qahtani, a 32-year-old Saudi who is against women driving.

“I see women are focusing on unimportant things like driving and not thinking about more important things like finding jobs,” he said.