Islamabad Police has been urging citizens to use a new taxi safety application, but the app itself is struggling with the most basic task of all: letting people create an account. In hands-on testing, the registration process failed again and again, and the application’s page on the Google Play Store is filled with users describing the same trouble. For a tool that is supposed to make travelling by taxi safer, that is a difficult place to start, because an app that citizens cannot open and use offers them no protection at all.
The application is called the Taxi Verification System, or TVS. Before beginning a journey, a passenger is meant to check a taxi and its driver through the app and confirm that both are genuine. That sounds useful, especially late at night or when travelling alone. The problem is that the system only recognises drivers who have signed up for it. A driver who has not registered simply does not appear, leaving the passenger with no way of knowing anything about the person behind the wheel.
That gap matters because the people a safety system most needs to catch are the least likely to volunteer for it. A driver with bad intentions has no reason to register his identity with a police application designed to expose him. The whole design therefore rests on the hope that drivers will willingly join, and so far the numbers suggest that hope has not been fulfilled. More than a year after the application was launched in July 2025, only around 13,000 drivers are reported to have signed up, which means a large share of the drivers a passenger might meet on any given day will simply not be in the system at all.
Registration Does Not Work
The practical problems begin even earlier, at the point where a citizen tries to use the service. Attempts to register an account on the TVS app repeatedly ended with the same message on screen: something went wrong. No account was created, no error was explained, and trying again produced the same result. For an ordinary user, that is the end of the road. Most people will not keep fighting with an application that refuses to let them in.
This does not appear to be an isolated fault affecting one phone or one attempt. The application’s listing on the Google Play Store carries a string of negative reviews from users reporting the same kind of failure. Some say they cannot register, others say they cannot log in after registering. One user reported that a login request had been left pending for more than ten months without any response. Others described error messages telling them that their account could not be found, or blaming a weak internet connection even when their connection was working perfectly well for everything else.
What Is the Point?
There is a second question hanging over the application, and it is just as awkward. Much of what TVS promises is already available on the ride-hailing platforms that most Islamabad residents already use. Services such as Yango and InDrive show passengers the driver’s name, photograph and vehicle details before the car arrives, and passengers can compare what they see on screen with the driver and the car that actually pull up. That is, in effect, the same identity check that TVS is offering, built into a booking that people already make every day.
A Safety App Has to Work First
None of this takes away from the intention behind the project. Passenger safety is a genuine concern, and the police deserve credit for trying to give citizens a practical tool rather than only issuing warnings. Women travelling alone, students returning home late, and visitors unfamiliar with the city would all benefit from a trustworthy way to check a taxi before getting in. The difficulty is that good intentions do not make a system useful. A safety application has to be judged by whether it works when an ordinary person picks up their phone and tries to use it, and on that test TVS is currently failing.
The lesson here reaches beyond one application. Public bodies in Pakistan have launched a long line of citizen-facing apps over the past decade, and too many of them have followed the same path: a launch announcement, some early publicity, and then a slow fade as users discover that the service does not work smoothly or does not cover enough of the problem it was meant to solve.
Until the registration and login failures are fixed, and until the system covers far more than the small group of drivers who have signed up so far, the Taxi Verification System risks becoming another well-meaning application that looks convincing in a presentation but offers little real value on the street. The police should fix the basics first, make the app work for every citizen who downloads it, and expand its coverage to the drivers passengers actually meet. Only then will it be worth promoting as a safety solution, because a safety app that citizens cannot even open is not protecting anyone.
