Purple for women, blue for men in Serbian buses
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A Serbian bus company met with outrage over "gender apartheid" after it introduced different coloured tickets for men and women to prevent abuse, radio B92 reported Wednesday.
Autoprevoz transport in central Cacak, owned by Israeli company Kavim Public Transportation Ltd since 2007, has introduced the same-priced daily bus tickets in different colors: red and purple for women and blue and yellow for men, the radio reported.
The move was an attempt to prevent widespread "abuse of all-day tickets" among the passengers, it added.
"Everyone will now have a ticket in accordance with the gender and it will not be possible for a wife to use the ticket in the morning and give it to her husband in the afternoon," Aleksandar Petronijevic of the company said.
But women rights activists were up in arms about the move.
"The move is a perverted interpretation of gender equality, it introduces a gender apartheid by issuing different tickets for men and women," said Stasa Zajevic of the non-governmental group "Women in Black."
Another critic, Goran Papovic of the National Consumers Association said the move would not really change anything.
"No one can prevent a woman, who cannot give the ticket to her husband, from lending it to a girlfriend," he said.