A Ride in the Dark: The Popular Free Service that Gets Students Home Safe

CORAL GABLES, Fla. – Every night at 7 p.m. sharp, three Freebee drivers begin their shift at the University of Miami, knowing they're often the difference between a student getting home safely and walking home alone. 

Freebee describes its service as “transforming the way people experience their communities by inspiring local mobility and seamlessly connecting them with their destination,” the company says on its website. At UM, that goal narrows down to something far more intentional: keeping students safe after dark. Freebee runs seven nights a week from 7 p.m. to 3:45 a.m., the exact stretch of hours that drivers and riders say matters most.

Many students on campus may not realize that the entire zone, which expanded last semester to reach Vox, Valencia and Lifetime on South Dixie Highway, is covered by only three drivers at a time. The City of Coral Gables offers its own Freebee service, but it is limited to a geographical area that does not include the University of Miami.

“Unfortunately, we only have three vehicles, so it's only three of us working,” said Lisy Castineira, Freebee's lead trainer. Before the zone expanded, she said, dropping a student three or four blocks before their address at 2 a.m. never sat right with her. “I always felt a little uncomfortable because you know it’s the middle of the night and then you have a student walking that far.”

With demand outpacing supply, drivers have built their own instincts for who gets picked up first once the sun goes down. 

“At night, I would prefer to [drive] the women first,” said Freebee driver Lenelle Miami Lebrun. “I'll message the guys and let them know I have some ladies waiting, so I can get them safely into their dorms.”

Freebee driver Norma Benrabe said she tries to hold to the same rule, even on the busiest of shifts. 

“Especially at night, if I find it's a girl's name, I try my best to wait, but there's times where we're so booked that we can't,” she said. Whatever the circumstances, she adds, the goal is the same. “In my way, I try to make you guys comfortable.”

That same watchfulness carries into the school year. Castineira said pickups near campus parties are common, and that the service becomes especially valuable during finals, when students need late rides to and from the library in the middle of the night. “I don't like to see students walking late at night,” she added. 

That is precisely how UM junior Ludovica Cariola discovered the service in her first year at UM. “There were some students studying late at night in the library, like me, and they told me there was this service called Freebee that would take you home for free if you lived in the surrounding area,” she recalled.

However, not every student is so quick to spread the word. Lebrun said some upperclassmen have kept Freebee quiet on purpose. “They gatekeep it,” he said, “because they don't like the wait time to be longer.”

Benrabe has heard the same thing from her riders. “The older kids are like, ‘No, don't tell the freshmen, because then the wait time will be longer.’ But it's not up to us to pick and choose who we take,” she said.

For those who do know about it, the payoff is trust that's hard to replicate. Cariola said it comes down to familiarity, seeing the same drivers night after night until she eventually stopped bothering to check who was behind the wheel.

“It is safer than an Uber,” she said, “because with Uber you don't know who it is and you don't talk to the drivers. With Freebee, not only do they know you're a UM student, but if something is a little bit off you could tell them to adjust the address, and they do.” By the end of her first year, Cariola knew nearly every driver on the road.

Looking ahead, Castineira said Student Government has raised the idea of extending Freebee into daytime hours and adding an additional vehicle, something FIU's version of the service already leans toward, running mornings and afternoons on weekdays with eight vehicles compared to the three at UM.

Whether UM’s Freebee ever expands into the daytime remains an open question. In the meantime, the schedule stays the same: 7 p.m. to 3:45 a.m., seven nights a week. There are only three of cars, but for the student who needs to get home safely, that's exactly what they need.