I needed a car to work.
The rental cost was crushing me.

The job disappeared first.

I had built a career in technology and operations. Then I was laid off into an IT job market so saturated that experience and capability were no longer enough to produce another job quickly.

Income collapsed. Housing followed. This was not a hypothetical exercise in service design; I was trying to keep moving while effectively homeless and watching the conventional paths back to stability close one by one.

No car meant no income—and sometimes no shelter.

Unemployment pushed me toward delivery gig work. That work has a brutally simple prerequisite: a vehicle. Lose the car and you do not merely lose transportation—you lose the ability to make the money needed to get another one.

During homelessness, I spent many nights sleeping in my van. It was transportation, a way to earn, and the only shelter available to me. Road2Work permits customers to use a van the same way when they need to. We do not require a permanent address to apply.

I was not alone. Several friends were trapped in the same cycle: capable of working, willing to work, and blocked by the cost of getting to the work.

For six months, the car ate the work.

I paid roughly $500 every week for rental vehicles. The rentals made gig work possible, but a punishing share of the income from that work immediately went back into keeping the rental.

That is the trap: you work to keep the car, and you need the car to keep working. There is very little left to build the savings that would let you escape.

The conventional answer was absurd.

National rental companies wanted unaffordable weekly rates and deposits large enough to defeat the entire point. If someone already had that much cash sitting around, she probably would not be looking for an emergency path back to work.

The system was built for travelers with credit cards—not working people trying to recover from a financial hit.

So I built the alternative I needed.

Road2Work provides affordable access to transportation with no security deposit, permits delivery gig work, accepts applicants without a permanent address, and publishes a transparent weekly price. The Pay It Forward portion of each paid rental helps keep vehicles operating and grow the fleet so another person can get the same chance.

This is not pity and it is not charity theater. It is lived experience turned into a practical system: a fair car, a workable price, and one less reason for a bad month to become a ruined life.