Cologne offers night taxi vouchers to help women get home safely

The German city of Cologne is offering night taxi vouchers to women to help them get home safely, in a pilot project inspired by similar initiatives in other parts of Germany.

The Women's Night Taxi scheme is providing a total of 1,500 vouchers worth €10 each to women and gender-diverse people for taxi journeys between the hours of 10 pm and 6 am, according to Cologne's city council. The vouchers can only be used with one company, Taxi Ruf, and the project will run until August 2025.

The city of Munich has been offering such night taxi coupons to women since 2020, and this year, the subsidy increased from €5 to €10 due to growing demand. Since then, other cities such as Stuttgart, Mannheim and Giessen have adopted the model.

While these schemes have been praised by many German news outlets and social media users, some people have questioned the relatively low value of the vouchers given that night-time taxis in major cities tend to cost far more than €10.

Similar apps and services promoting women's safety have been launched in recent years in Germany, including a hotline staffed by volunteers who talk to callers during their journeys and take their information to pass on to police in case of an emergency.

More than two-thirds of German women are afraid to take public transport when it gets dark, according to a 2020 public survey conducted for the country's BKA federal police.

And research that same year by NGO Plan International — based on a survey of 1,000 female residents of Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne and Munich — found that a quarter of women had experienced sexual harassment and a fifth had been followed, insulted or threatened while moving around their cities.

Cologne is currently preparing for its New Year festivities, nine years after hundreds of women were attacked and sexually assaulted during celebrations near the city's cathedral. At least 600 women filed complaints to police ranging from sexual molestation to theft in the aftermath of the New Year celebrations in the city on 31 December 2015.