Ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft have normalized riding with strangers and transformed it into something the average young person doesn’t think twice about, especially those frequenting bar scenes.

Chariot for Women is a new Uber-like company that plans to launch in Boston on April 19.  The company was created by Uber driver Michael Pelletz to provide safe rides for women and a safe environment for female drivers.

Chariot for Women will be a ride-sharing company with female drivers for female passengers of any age, as well as children.

Pelletz formed Chariot for Women because of an encounter he had with a belligerent male passenger in his car. As a grown man, Pelletz did not feel safe and thought of women everywhere and how they would have handled the situation.

This female-only service comes at exactly the right time. In February, an Uber driver reportedly raped a woman in San Diego.  The following month, BuzzFeed News attained screenshots from Uber’s customer support information documenting thousands of complaints of rape and sexual assault from Dec. 2012 to Aug. 2015.

As a 21-year-old woman living on an urban campus, I use Uber and Lyft a couple times a week, minimum. Using these ride-sharing services so frequently has left me with my fair share of driver-based horror stories. Knowing I would always have a female Uber driver would definitely make me feel safer, but on the other hand so would thorough background checks for Uber and Lyft’s employees. I had assumed that, as it is a service where you are getting into the car of someone employed by Uber or Lyft, the companies would have a fairly extensive background checking system. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

Neither company requires its drivers to undergo fingerprint background checks, which would provide more accurate information and leave less room for error and fraud when determining whether a potential driver is safe or not. Chariot for Women is currently using the Criminal Offender Record Information background check for its drivers, which is the same used in Massachusetts schools and daycares. The company also plans to implement fingerprint background checks as soon as possible.

An all female ride-sharing program is not a solution to end violence and assaults on women in this type of setting, but it will make riding alone less worrisome for women in Boston. However, there is one major issue they must overcome first.

It is being widely speculated that legal trouble is on the way for Chariot for Women. Though the company hasn’t started giving rides just yet, they are sure to run into some trouble for hiring only women.

“To limit employees to one gender, you have to have what the law calls a bona fide occupational qualification. And that’s a really strict standard,” Massachusetts employment law specialist, Joseph Sulman told the Boston Globe. “The law’s really tough on that. For gender, it’s not enough to say, ‘we really just want to have a female here because our customers prefer that to feel safer.”

Pelletz addressed the sure-to-come legal problems when talk to TechCrunch, a technology news and analysis website.

“We look forward to legal challenges,” said Pelletz. “We want to show there’s inequality in safety in our industry. We hope to go to the US Supreme Court to say that if there’s safety involved, there’s nothing wrong with providing a service for women.”

Ultimately, Chariot for Women is not a catchall solution, but it is a good step on our way to safer ride-sharing as a whole. Despite an uncertain future for the company, it has the potential to change the way women travel.