(Source: MIRS.news, Published 07/11/2024) For $5 per hour, up to $50 daily, east side Detroiters can drive an insured electric vehicle (EV) located at River Crest Apartments, through a new ride-share system that launched earlier this month.  

The ride-share system is part of the national Affordable Mobility Platform (AMP), which aims to deploy a total of 50 shared EVs and charging stations in affordable housing sites through the end of next year. The platform is currently present in Detroit, Ann Arbor and Kalamazoo, and is being developing in Grand Rapids.  

AMP was first launched in February 2022 as a partnership between Forth Mobility, a nonprofit dedicated to electric transportation access, and Mobility Development Partners, which works with ride-sharing, bike-sharing and similar operations.  

According to Connor Herman, Forth Mobility's program manager, the EV ride-share program has been financially backed by seed funding, the U.S. Department of Energy, DTE Energy and General Motors' Climate Equity Fund.  

"That's been able to pay for the charging stations, to buy the cars, to pay for this initial service and to pay for Mobility Development to operate the service and all of those things. And we have funding now for a couple of years, and then the goal is for this program to develop into a sustainable thing that can expand through the fares that we get," Herman said. 

Herman was illustrating a vision of states, cities and housing developers investing their own dollars into EV ride-share programs.  

He said low-income individuals predominantly purchase used vehicles, and because EVs are still an emerging technology, the availability of used EVs is limited, especially depending on what state someone lives in.  

He said that not just for EVs, new vehicles in general are an expensive form of transportation.  

"Owning a car, insurance, gas, maintenance, paying for parking in some scenarios … is very expensive and cost prohibitive, so having a car-share vehicle where you don't need to pay for any of that when you're not using it, can really help make this technology more accessible," Herman said on this week's episode of the MIRS Monday Podcast.  

He added that for every single ride-share vehicle, they're installing one "dual port charging station," with a second port available to members of the public or a housing site's residents.  

Herman also said that some studies have shown that a single ride-share vehicle can replace nine to 13 individual cars.  

James Delgado, of Mobility Development Partners, who was on the podcast alongside Herman, said although some of the ride-share operations are placed in apartment complexes, they are traditionally open to the public.  

"Anyone from the local community or from Detroit that wants to go and utilize one of these cars, they simply need to download the app, sign up, become a member, and then they can use these vehicles," Delgado said. "When we run someone's driver's license, we want to see ideally, no major accidents, no major moving violations … I mean everyone gets a ticket from time to time, right? So we're not looking for a squeaky clean driver's record."  

The one-time application fee is $10 to enter the ride-share system, and taxes are additionally applied to the final costs. Moreover, Delgado said they don't want to see any driving-while-intoxicated records among the system's drivers.  

Herman said something the AMP team looks at when going into affordable housing locations is a community's access to public transit and how spread out things are.  

"What is (car) ownership like? Are there a lot of single-car families? Are there a lot of people without car ownership? Because that's a signal to us that, 'Oh, there is a good percentage of people that probably are ready to use this because you're probably not going to switch over immediately, at least, from your private car to a car share," he said.  

Delgado said one of the earliest members of its River Crest program in Detroit is a woman caring for her 95-year-old mother, and she plans to use a vehicle to take her mother to the pharmacy, the grocery store and to family outings without having to wait at a bus stop.  

Furthermore, Herman hopes the ride-share program could serve as an educational tool to make drivers more comfortable with EVs.