On 18 August 2026, the Bangladesh Road Transport Corporation (BRTC) launched its women-only “Pink Bus” service. The initiative promises to ensure safe commuting for women through 14 pink buses operating in Dhaka, Bogra & Chattogram. To complete the photo op, the state has not just painted the buses pink but also dressed the female drivers and conductors in pink uniforms, turning a desperate public safety issue into a carefully coordinated public relations spectacle.
While some have appreciated the initiative and others have criticized it, a few deeper fundamental questions emerge. Why can’t women’s safety be ensured in a shared civic space without having them segregated from it? Do women need to retreat to a male-free enclave just to feel safe? Why do urban planning decisions in Dhaka tend to fall into the same old binary of “men-only” or “women-only”?
The launch of pink buses across Dhaka and two other cities certainly does not indicate an urban reform. It enforces that women can achieve safety only by isolating themselves from public space, while allowing the state to avoid confronting the chaotic private transport sector. It is also a soft admission of male violence as an unchangeable reality. Having a dedicated bus for women raises an unsettling question: does the government’s approach to settling the transport crisis assume that women cannot be safe in public spaces alongside men? If we start to normalize the idea that women can only be safe if they are being kept separated from men, then we risk extending that logic everywhere else, for example, in schools, in workplaces, and in other shared common spaces in society.
Besides, the dedicated bus service ignores the economic geography of female labor. Women’s travel hardly contains only one purpose or a single destination line. It often combines work travel with errands or school drop-offs or household care. Expecting women to align their travel needs with a single infrequent bus simply inflicts severe time poverty as well as restricting their physical and economic mobility.
Moreover, the math does not add up. A study in 2021 shows that around a quarter of working women in Dhaka rely on public buses, and women make up 35 percent of the workforce. Considering this a pilot of the initiative, can the state afford sufficient vehicles to cover all the routes all day long? If the pink bus initiative is scaled up in the future, will women be completely restricted from riding the regular public buses? Anecdotal accounts suggest that when only one pink bus is operating on a particular route, women often receive unsolicited advice from male passengers that they should ride the pink bus only. This indicates that the policy may give male commuters a legitimate excuse to exclude women from public transport. The policy that was framed as a protective measure may quickly shift to an informal mechanism of social control restricting women’s mobility.
Daphne Spain’s work on gender and space can help us understand this problem. Her thesis on spatial segregation suggests that when a society segregates physical spaces based on men and women, it rarely creates a “separate but equal” opportunity. If the segregation is imposed through systematic pressure rather than a woman’s voluntary choice, it may reinforce gender stratification and inequalities. Excluding women from public buses silently establishes a message that women are unfit for regular public life, while men own the public space by default.
Pulling off a gender equality campaign through the pink bus initiative provides the government with an easy, photogenic win, which is a safer political bet than confronting a powerful transport syndicate that holds high political costs.
This approach of isolating women is nothing new. BRTC’s previous women-only fleet in 2009 and 2014 collapsed by 2020 due to a shortage of riders, while a 2018 private trial by Rangs Group was also suspended by 2022 for monetary losses. These initiatives prove that segregated transit is just another operational dead end.
The state and society remain united in one troubling habit of ignoring the root cause behind the failure of these initiatives: segregated transit is not economically and operationally sustainable. By treating women’s safety as a niche service requiring separate buses rather than a basic right on every vehicle, the government guarantees the failure of these token initiatives. The year-old strategy of segregating women from public buses is not going to solve the problem without addressing the core regulatory issues.
As we prepare for LDC graduation, sustaining economic growth will prove impossible if our female workforce remains constrained by a hostile public transit system. It needs strict legal enforcement of the existing laws, accountable transit cartels, and zero tolerance for women in every single bus. To empower women, it is not necessary to separate them from public space; rather, it is necessary to provide them with equal ownership of public spaces as men.
