Female motorcyclist pitches for helmets, safety awareness
KARACHI: Tayyaba, 26, zips through Karachi’s traffic on her motorcycle every day to get to work, with a helmet perched on top of her head.
The traffic law mandates the helmet for both male and female riders and co-rider on a motorcycle. As a woman, Tayyaba can go without the safety gadget but chooses not to.
Campaigners are becoming increasingly vocal about the consequences of the helmet-compulsory drive by the Karachi traffic police. The latter are bent upon making females on motorcycles wear helmets too. This can help save dozens of lives lost each year as well as injuries of hundreds others, they claim.
For a young woman like Tayyaba, who learned how to ride the motorcycle herself, the helmetcompulsory drive of the Karachi traffic police is praiseworthy, but she is not very optimistic about its success. “We are a stubborn society,” she said. “It will be extremely difficult to make the women understand that it is for their own safety.”
According to her, the helmet will not be much of a problem for the women who already wear a scarf or burka. “It’s like wearing a cap,” she said. “Gradually, you become accustomed to it.” She added that if women kept worrying about how the safety gadget will affect their hairstyle, then one can only feel sorry for their naivety.
Twenty six-year-old Tayyaba is one of the few women who ride a motorcycle against the norm in Karachi
Finding it weird
Tayyaba said that when she rides her motorcycle on Karachi’s Shara-e-Faisal, the people around show her the thumbs-up gesture. “If a girl can drive a car, why can’t she ride a two-wheeler?” she questioned. According to her, she has been riding a bicycle since childhood. “When the bicycle turned into a motorcycle, people started finding it weird.”
Tayyaba started riding her friend’s motorcycle in 2009 when she enrolled herself in Karachi University. In 2010, she felt the need to buy her own motorcycle. “I used to live in the campus and had to leave for my job very early in the morning,” she recalled. “I had to wait for hours for a rickshaw and used to get late for work. Then one day, I bought my own motorcycle and stood against the patriarchal mind-set. It’s better to have your own conveyance than depend on someone else.”
According to her, the government should introduce the Scooty motorcycle in Pakistan, which is one of the best rides for a woman. “It doesn’t matter if you wear shalwar kameez, jeans, or a burka. A Scooty can easily be ridden,” she pointed out.
Road traffic injury research and prevention centre accident investigation officer Irfan Saleem shared that in 2014, 340 cases of motorcycle accidents were registered in which the burka or the dupatta of a female got stuck in the wheel and led to the accident. “Of these, 23 died,” he said, adding that the long dupattas fly with the wind and get stuck in the chain or the wheel.
Mahnaz Rahman, the resident director of Aurat Foundation, agreed. “Most of the motorcycle accidents take place when the huge shawls that women use to cover themselves get stuck in the wheel or chain,” she said. According to her, the helmet is a safety gadget and should not be genderspecific.