Why we started Glide

There's a quiet thing that happens when a person can no longer easily get around. The world doesn't end — it just gets smaller. The doctor's visit becomes a production. The grocery run becomes a favor to ask. The lunch with a friend becomes "maybe next month." One by one, the ordinary parts of a life slip out of reach, not because they're gone, but because there's no good way to get to them.

We started Glide because that shouldn't be how it goes.

A ride is never just a ride

For an older adult, or someone living with a disability, transportation isn't a convenience — it's the hinge everything else swings on. Independence, health, dignity, connection: they all depend on being able to get from here to there. Take the ride away and you don't just take a trip. You take the appointment, the outing, the sense of being a full participant in your own life.

That's a lot to hang on a ride. And for far too many people, the ride is exactly what's missing.

The options weren't built for this

It's not that no one's tried. It's that the usual answers quietly leave these riders out. Standard rideshare can be expensive, unpredictable, and rarely built with accessibility in mind. Family and neighbors step in where they can — but that's a debt of favors no one should have to keep tallying. Public options are stretched thin and shrinking. The result is a gap, and millions of people live inside it.

So we made a different bet

We built Glide around three choices, each one aimed squarely at the person in the back seat.

Self-driving Teslas, so we can give rides at a scale volunteers alone never could — the technology doing the heavy lifting on the road.

A vetted safety operator on board every ride, because a person who needs a hand with the curb, or just a calm face, should never be handed off to a machine alone. The car handles the driving; the operator handles the care.

Funded by the community, so the rider never pays. No fare, no surge, no tip — for adults 65 and over and people with disabilities, a Glide ride simply costs nothing.

In the open, on purpose

The rides stay free because people who believe in this chip in to keep them going — and we show exactly where that support goes, in real time, on our community board. We didn't want anyone to have to trust us on faith. We wanted them to be able to look.

This is the beginning

We're early, and we're honest about that. Glide is small today and growing carefully, one community at a time. But the belief underneath it is simple and it isn't going to change: getting where you need to go shouldn't depend on your age, your body, or your bank balance.

If that belief is yours too, there's a place for you here.

• See how a Glide ride works — start here
• Help keep rides free — contribute
• Give your time — become a safety operator