image:19668:0::0

It's Moscow. It's 3 a.m. A girl, very pretty and very drunk stumbles out of a club. She's wearing a bit less than might be considered wise. She hails a cab and voila, three Ladas line up to give her a ride. Within no time, the driver has agreed on a price, and off they go.

What happens next, police spokesman Vladimir Korobkov says is not unheard of: A couple of hours later, in tatters, cold and bleeding, the girl wakes up in a park, she'd been drugged and raped. She's lucky to be alive.

Admittedly, Korobkov said, these cases are rare, but not that rare, even among established cab companies.

Now women who are tired of predatory taxi drivers, whose behavior ranges from flirtatious to downright violent, have a new way home. Pink Taxi.

Pink Taxi is a Moscow service run by women for women. Not only does the company guarantee a safe ride, Pink Taxi drivers also offer advice, share gossip and make a concerted effort to lift their passengers' spirits.

Many female cab passengers say they're never going back to male cab drivers. "I don't know where to start," said Olga Kuznetsova, 34, a mother of three who uses the Pink Taxis at least twice a week with her kids. "The male drivers smoke, spit, play loud music, and generally don't give a damn about the comfort of the passenger."

Olga Fomina, 34, Pink Taxi's general director, talks about their success. "By mobilizing women, we are solving the safety problem they run into in taxis."

Fomina and two girlfriends launched the cab service last August. All three women had been working in real estate but were tired of their jobs. The Pink Taxi business has been growing almost from the beginning. Last August, Pink Taxi received only 20 calls. Today, the company averages about 140 calls every day. They are saying that the demand is outstripping supply and the company is only able to answer 70 of those calls.

As the business grew, Pink Taxi has branched out and added new services. They pick kids up from school, they will buy and deliver flowers, and they'll even takes care of the weekly run to the grocery store.

The company is still in it's original "corporate headquarters" -- a couple of cramped, wood-paneled offices in an industrial park on the fringes of eastern Moscow. "Before we created the company, everyone was so skeptical about the idea," Fomina said, adding that male friends poked fun them.

Fomina she heard a radio report on women-only taxi services in London and Tokyo last January so she pooling her resources, with two friends and Pink Taxi was born.

In the beginning, the company's taxi "fleet" consisted of two Daewoo Nexia cars with two female drivers. Just a scant six months later, they have 20 Daewoos and 27 drivers. The company is planning to replace its Daewoo's with Volvo S40s. Barely containing a smile, Fomina said: "We're going strong."

She stressed that the passengers weren't the only ones in need of a helping hand. Their drivers, who are all women, have been to university and range in ages from 27 to 55. Fomina notes that for many in their mid-thirties it's tough to find work. "After having kids, what is there for a woman to do?"

However, Pink Taxi is not getting support from everyone.

A local gypsy cab driver Vyacheslav Sokolnikov is against women driving at all. "They slow down traffic," he said, "and they don't have the necessary coordination to drive a car."

And, New Taxi's marketing director, Edvard Mkhitaryan is quoted as saying "Yes, I think Pink Taxi is a good idea. But then, communism was a good idea, too."

Prominent feminist Maria Arbatova shrugged off the criticism. "The labeling of a taxi service for women as sexist is paramount to calling a female restroom sexist," Arbatova added. "The absence of such services was a manifestation of sexism."

This was an excellent idea, given the problems that women were facing as well as some rather, shall we say, antiquated ideas about women and women drivers!