Neighbors drive neighbors in the absence of Uber, Lyft
Three mornings a week, Herminia Ibarra makes her way to a fleet of sparkling electric vehicles lined up in a dusty alley alongside a former diesel repair shop. Of the five Chevy Bolts, three Tesla Ys, two Volkswagen e-Golfs and a BMW i3, she always tries to snag her favorite: the red Bolt set up with her Bluetooth. In this EV, she will pick up the two retired farmworkers who are her regular clients and ferry them on two-lane roads to their dialysis appointments 20 miles away.
Ibarra is a raitera, a term for the practice of neighbors providing rides to community members in need. The shop, which has a Mexican flag wrapped around its staircase, is the nerve center of Green Raiteros, an EV ride-sharing initiative in Huron, California, that shuttles lowincome residents, many of them elderly, to medical appointments for free.
Ibarra, behind the wheel of the red Bolt, is what its proponents call “mobility justice” in action: an effort to address the reality that low-income communities most affected by pollution from diesel trucks, highways and other sources have had the least access to zero-emission vehicles.
Enter the Green Raiteros. Born of a lack of public transit and stubborn resolve, the program was masterminded by the Latino Equity Advocacy & Policy Institute, a nonprofit founded by Rey León, Huron’s mayor.
Similar efforts are underway elsewhere in California, New York and other areas, along with a growing push in Washington, D.C., to subsidize EV programs. Under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the federal government is providing $700 million in grants to local governments to set up charging infrastructure in underserved areas.
The goal of these initiatives is to give more people in low-income communities access to cleaner forms of transportation. In Huron, the result of the local effort is 30 charging stations placed strategically around the city.
Ringed by vast acres of garlic and tomato fields, Huron is a small agricultural city in “the Heart of the Valley,” as a sign on the main road into town announces. Of Huron’s 6,200 residents, 95% are Latino and about 50% are immigrants. And despite being just 50 miles from Fresno, Huron is too remote for Uber or Lyft to operate.
León has referred to the tradition of ride sharing in Latino communities as “Indigenous Ubers.” He is the son of a migrant worker brought to the United States under the Bracero program that ran from 1942 to 1964, and a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. The emotional resonance of ridesharing came early: When León was a child, his uncle worked as a raitero.
“He was a tall man with a big sombrero and a tiny car — a green Pinto,” he recalled. “He was like Curious George with the Man with the big Yellow Hat. Big guy, small car.”
When León’s uncle wasn’t available, the family’s transit options were limited. León remembers he and his mother had to take the county bus to visit a critically injured cousin in the hospital some 55 miles away, an exhausting 31/2-hour journey.
For León, the ordeal from his youth laid the groundwork for Green Raiteros. Electric vehicles that usually zip around the dappled hills of wealthy Malibu or Marin County are now accessible to “maintainers of the food chain,” as León describes his majority farmworker residents.
Huron’s average household income is $35,000, and many people, León said, spend 30% to 40% of their monthly wages on gas-powered cars that frequently break down. Residents breathe air consistently ranked as some of the country’s worst.
León launched Green Raiteros in 2018 with private foundation money and $500,000 from the settlement of a legal case between NRG Energy and the California Public Utilities Commission. The Teslas were courtesy of a $1 million California Air Resources Board grant, the state air quality regulator charged with developing programs to fight climate change. (A statute requires at least 35% of certain climate investment projects benefit lowincome communities.) The $150,000 annual operating budget is a mix of funding from the air board, state agencies and philanthropies, boosted by a contribution from General Motors.
“It’s always about playing catch-up,” León said.
Tax credits and consumer rebates for purchasing EVs tend to be of little use for people who cannot afford a car.
“Owning a car is a poverty perpetuator,” León observed, sitting in the Green Raiteros dispatch center behind the faded brown stucco colonnades of the main street.