Tracy Renkin, journalist

First published May 19 2018 in the TasWeekend magazine (The Hobart Mercury)

JENNY McCabe’s little granite-coloured Kia Rio hatchback doesn’t exactly stand out in Hobart’s traffic. But chances are it’s carrying precious cargo. It might be a little old lady from Battery Point. She’s perched up in the front seat happily chatting to McCabe about where she’s off to today. She pre-booked her ride a fortnight ago because she’s too scared to hail a taxi. Or it could be she’s driving a backseat of boisterous primary school aged siblings giggling and elbowing each other after school. They are usually in after-school-care until it closes but now they are on their way to their mother’s office in the city. The mother will be able to make her 5pm meeting without worrying about picking them up.  Later that evening, there’s a young woman in the front seat. She’s going to wake up with a shocking headache tomorrow because she stayed out way later than she planned to. But, thanks to McCabe, at least she didn’t have to wake her parents to ensure she got home safely.

It doesn’t matter who McCabe is driving - even if she’s taking the family dog to the vet - the passengers in her car are precious to someone and McCabe takes the responsibility of her job very seriously. This mature, part-time social worker and counsellor from Glenorchy is one of the city’s first drivers for shebah - Australia’s first all-female ride share service. “It’s a passion for me to support women and children and keep them safe,” McCabe says. “It’s what I want to do.”

McCabe is one of seven shebah drivers in Hobart. There are another 30 here waiting for their shebah paperwork to be processed. Nationally there are 1005 drivers since its launch in March last year. The oldest shebah driver is 71 but the average age is 51. Most are university educated and hold another job. Already 60,000 women nationally have downloaded the shebah app and drivers right around Australia are clocking up in access of 5000 trips per month. Shebah plans to branch out right around Tasmania.  As soon as there are four or more women in any area who are willing to drive for shebah, they will turn on the app in that place.

Of course, shebah was created by a woman who was not just looking at solving a problem for herself, but wanted to help other women too. That woman is George McEncroe, 49 - a Melbourne stand up comedian and sole parent of four aged 15 to 20. The trigger was her daughter and her friends telling her that ‘feet on the street’ was the safest way to get around after dark because so many of them had had negative experiences in taxis and Ubers. “My daughter was often asked if she had a boyfriend while in a taxi or if she was going to meet a boyfriend. One of her friends was grabbed by the throat by a driver who tried to kiss her. My daughter has come home and said ‘Mum I had a driver who kept looking at me in the rear mirror and was slowly licking his lips at me’. When do you take lip-licking to the cops? It’s not an assault. You can’t legislate against lip-licking but it’s creepy and disgusting and scary to young women.”

After her divorce in 2013, she needed money to buy a house so she thought she’d give Uber driving a go. She signed up twice but chickened out both times because she was scared of being raped. “There is a huge issue of sexual abuse in Ubers and taxis,” McEncroe says. “The data on these sexual abuse cases will never be released but every time I speak publicly about shebah I can’t even make it off the stage and back to my table before women of all ages approach me to tell me their taxi and Uber horror stories. They are all frightened that the drivers know where they live. It wasn’t just the fear of being raped for me but also about being in a really scary situation that I couldn’t control. I was scared about being hit over the head by a guy in the backseat. The thought of driving drunk guys around was too scary for me - I’m talking about driving around sinister, scary ‘this-might-be-my-last-night’ kind of drunks”. She met with female Uber drivers before launching shebah to ask them what they thought should go into her app service. “One female Uber driver told me she had a man who sat in the front seat and started masturbating directly beside her and refused to stop and other Uber driver told me she was driving under the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the male passenger in the backset took off his seat belt and reached through to grope her breast.”

Back in Hobart, many women have told TasWeekend they don’t feel safe in a taxi or an Uber.  One, in her late 30s recalls a terrifying taxi ride home two years ago where the driver insisted she have sex with him. The mother, who has lived here all her life, says she’s now too scared to catch a taxi. She doesn’t want us to use her name because she is fearful the young taxi driver knows where she lives. “I very rarely go out,” she says. “But a good friend was having a birthday and really wanted all her friends there so we went to a few pubs in the city.  I’d only had two drinks and at 10pm decided I wanted to go home because I wanted to be with my family,” she says. The taxi driver who took her home hit on her almost instantly and was very insistent they should have sex. “He was going on and on about wanting to have sex with me and I just kept saying ‘no thank you,” she says. “He leant over while he was driving and started to touch my leg and my arm and my hand. When he started touching me I thought ‘okay, no” it made me feel very uncomfortable  and vulnerable and I didn’t feel safe. I just kept telling him ‘no thank you’ and I held it together in the car but when I got home I just cried and cried because he knew where I lived and that make me feel a hundred times less safe. I cried all night long. It really rattled me and made me feel very vulnerable in my own home for a long time”.

Just last month a Blackmans Bay woman who listens to police radio for a hobby says she heard something really confronting. The mother of three says the police were called to an alleged rape in a taxi, and radioed back that the driver was “known for accepting sex as payment. “It sounded terrifying,” she says. “You could hear the woman screaming in the background. I thought ‘holy hell’ that was a bit dramatic for mid-week.”

To help women feel safer one Hobart taxi company, 13ECAB, is about to launch a new protocol. Kim Trethowan, who runs the cab company says her male drivers would radio back to their radio room the name of the woman they have in their cab and their destination. “We hope that by making that call in front of our female passenger, by letting our radio room know that we have you in one of our cabs, that would make them feel more comfortable,” she says.

Steph Mazengarb is another woman who has tried to help. As a 19-year-old she had a scary taxi experience. She was sharing a cab back to her Sandy Bay house with her best friend after a night on the town two years ago. She says the man who drove them home later randomly started to show up to her house and park his taxi out the front and just sit there for hours. A few months later she was walking to the bus and the same man in his taxi drove up next to her, wound down his window and asked her to get in. “A lot of girls don’t want to get into taxis because they don’t feel safe,” she says. Mazengarb was so fed up with creepy taxi experiences she’d endured, six months ago she helped to set up a casual facebook group called Hobart Girls Lift to help young women get around town safely. The closed Facebook group is made up of more than 2000 women. Now 21, she works full time and also studies at the University of Tasmania and says many of the girls who use the page for lifts in and around Hobart are at university or working part time. “I love being able to help women but the people who manage this page all work and have busy lives and it sounds great that there is this new female ride-share shebah now in Hobart. I just think it’s a really great idea that ensures the safety of both drivers and passengers and a it’s a way to get women an income.”

Shebah’s founder says she’s building an “eco-system" to not only help keep women safe but also assist busy families who spend too much time in the car. But the goal she’s super excited about is helping women get back to work in a flexible job so they can work around the children. Shebah drivers can drive with their own children in the car.  They keep 85 per cent of their fares. They can turn the app on and off whenever it suits them. They don’t have a boss to apologise to when one of the children stays home from school sick, and they can drive as little or as much as they like. “I think my desire to help build this community is because I’ve been so stuck before,” McEncroe says. “I had four children under five. My parents lived away and I suppose I’m trying to create the environment that I wish I had of had at my disposal that I didn’t have”. 

Shebah drivers can take all primary school age children and even stop off to run errands on the way before they get to their final destination. McEncroe: “There’s just a whole bunch of stuff that women opt out of because their second shift starts at 3pm…getting to Coles to pick up the ingredients for dinner, stopping off at Kmart because it’s Harmony Day tomorrow and we need to buy orange tee-shirts for everybody and there’s always that one kid who leaves it to the last minute to tell you he’s got an urgent friggin’ ancient pyramids assignment due tomorrow and that means someone’s got to stop and buy some clay and all those things invariably fall to women to do. But if you’ve got a shebah driver then she can do those things for you and you can be chatting to your children the whole time and you can still say ‘I’m going into my meeting now and I’ll check in with you again and see you when I get home’.  We are trying with all our might to give women access to income and some access to other women - two things that will hopefully eliminate depression and loneliness. We sit them down, we get them over the confidence gap with the technology and away they go and some of them are making $1200 a week. And they are telling us they love to drive and chat to people and that’s because they are bloody good at it. They’ve got all these skills which nobody has ever wanted to give them pittance for”. She says shebah is growing steadily at about 40 per cent per month. “Ideally we will be everywhere,” she says. “Name a place where women are scared of being in a confined space with a bloke they don’t know, and there’s a market for shebah.”

Back in Glenorchy, it’s a Saturday night and McCabe has gone to bed early and set her alarm for 11pm so she can wake up and drive the 10 kilometres to get to Salamanca in time for a young woman’s 11.30pm finish. She’s only going a few minutes up the road to Battery Point but she’s too scared to walk there at that time of night. “That’s what I’m here for,” McCabe says. “If it means another woman gets home safe, I’m happy to do it.”