in Rouen, Drive Lady wants to make the app and the good weather – Liberation

Carpooling has never been better than in recent years. The most popular platform in the sector in France, BlaBlaCar, boasts of having 20 million users (100 million internationally). Security is one of the major issues in this market driven by the economic and ecological crises. Sharing a car for inter- and intra-urban journeys is far from being a trivial act for users. It is from this observation that the project was born, soon to materialize, by Camille Cottard, a first-year student at Neoma Business School, a business school in Rouen. At 19, she imagined with one of her classmates, who has since left the project, an application based on the BlaBlaCar model but reserved 100% for women. The companies already established on this particularly lucrative market generally allow a driver to choose the gender of the people she is transporting, but not the other way around, except at Citygo, which has set up Women Only to connect users, drivers and passengers.

“We sometimes avoid going out”

It was after seeing the appearance of VTC companies forbidden to men, mainly in Paris, with more or less success (Woman at the wheel, Women Drive 4 U, Kolett, etc.), that the Norman student decided to get started. Camille Cottard won a hackathon a few months ago organized by the Neoma Business School in Rouen incubator and has since benefited from its services. She hopes to be able to launch her application next September, but is still looking for an engineer to complete the team of two technicians working alongside her. The idea for Drive Lady was born from the observation that women of all ages avoided carpooling for fear of being bothered, especially at night. “A friend had a problem with carpoolingshe had to manage inappropriate remarks and even a little more, testifies Camille Cottard, originally from Le Havre. With other friends, we could no longer feel permanently insecure. We sometimes avoid going out because we don’t want to take public transport.

The principle of Drive Lady is to offer a “safe place” to the fairer sex. Various surveys have shown that women do not feel protected on public transport. Thus, in 2018, a study by the National Observatory of Delinquency and Criminal Responses indicated that more than half of women (51%) said they felt unsafe when using public transport.