Saudi Arabia will lift its ban on women drivers in June 2018, in a move the interior minister said would "transform traffic safety":
Saudi Arabia's lifting of a much criticized ban on women drivers will reduce the number of car crashes in a country with one of the world's worst traffic-related death rates, its interior minister said on Thursday.
King Salman announced the historic change on Tuesday, ending a conservative tradition which limited women's mobility and was seen by rights activists as an emblem of their suppression in the kingdom where Islam originated.
Saudi Arabia was the only remaining country in the world to bar women from driving, a policy that will officially end in June 2018 after a ministerial committee reports on measures needed for implementation.
Prince Abdulaziz bin Saud bin Nayef, the interior minister who took over from his uncle in June, said security forces were ready to apply traffic laws to men and women, though he did not mention if women would be recruited as traffic police.
"Women driving cars will transform traffic safety into a pedagogical practice which will reduce human and economic losses caused by accidents," he was quoted as saying on the ministry's official Twitter feed. He did not elaborate.
The current King of Saudi Arabia was crowned on January 23, 2015.
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(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Friday September 29 2017, @09:46PM
16 years after their boys managed to crash transcontinental planes into skyscrapers, and seeing that they still have some of the deadliest roads around, the Saudi have decided that maybe there was value in women's safer driving habits. As long as they keep them from owning cellphones, at least.