Shortly before 8:30 on a temperate November morning, Jose Perales' cellphone starts to sound.

"Hola. Buenos dias. Si, voy en camino para alla," Perales answers. Good morning. Yes, I'm on my way.

Just like that, faster than Uber, the Magic Bus is seven minutes from its first passenger of the day.

For the next 12 hours, the bus - in actuality, a brightly painted van bearing the slogan "For all who labor for a better life" - will make 20-minute loops around Gulfton, a working-class neighborhood of apartment complexes and strip malls in southwest Houston.

It will trundle past fruterias and carnicerias, dollar stores and washaterias, charter school campuses and health clinics, wind along Gulfton Avenue and Bellaire Boulevard, rattle down Chimney Rock and up Hillcroft.

Along the way, the 15-passenger van will fill up with women running errands before shifts as restaurant workers and house cleaners, mothers scooping up children from school, families heading to the Baker-Ripley Center for a monthly food bank.

For these regular riders, who don't own a car or whose husbands use the family's only vehicle to get to work, the Magic Bus is a lifeline.

Without the service, operated by the nonprofit Neighborhood Centers, many of the families would lose connections that bolster chances of upward mobility: getting to health care and social services, community programs and extracurricular activities, English classes and computer training.

Yeni Gonzales, who clambers onto the van at 9:19, carrying two plastic bags filled with groceries from Fiesta food market, boards the Magic Bus several times a day.

Her husband, a construction worker, needs the family car to travel to work sites up to two hours away. The Gonzaleses can't afford another one. Even the $1.25 Metro fare whittles too much from their spare income.

So Gonzales counts on the Magic Bus. To retrieve her three children, released at three different times from SER-Ninos charter school. To shop for the best prices at competing supermarkets. To scour the bargain bins at Family Thrift Outlet.

On this day, it takes about 15 minutes for the Magic Bus to carry Gonzales from the supermarket to her Gulfton Avenue apartment building. In about half an hour, it will be time to pick up her preschooler, and she'll dial Perales again.

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For more than a century, the Neighborhood Centers has worked to lift people out of poverty by asking them a simple question: What do you need?

In Gulfton, a predominantly Latino and immigrant community where nearly half of residents have a household income under $25,000 and most families live paycheck to paycheck, one thing many asked for was reliable transportation.

More Information This is the fourth story in a series about income inequality in Houston, now at its highest level in nearly a century.

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About one-third of Gulfton residents depend on something other than a car as a primary means of transportation. Yet there, as in many low-income neighborhoods, streets are often dangerous to cross on foot, sidewalks are nonexistent and public transit can be relatively costly and unreliable.

About 122,000 households in the Houston region do not have cars; about three-fourths of those are low-income. Many more, unable to afford the $8,000 to $10,000-a-year cost of maintaining a vehicle, make do with one car.

The Magic Bus - named for a song by The Who - was launched to help plug the transportation gap, said Angela Blanchard, president and CEO of the nonprofit, which serves half a million people a year at 70 sites across the city. The weekday service is available to Neighborhood Centers clients, who pay a membership fee based on a sliding scale for a range of classes, social services and vocational training.

Neighborhood Centers also assists clients with securing car loans and finding reputable used car dealers - a nod to the critical role of transportation in breaking the cycle of poverty, Blanchard said.

Without a car, people miss out on job opportunities because they can't get to interviews, pre-employment screening or the job site. If they do secure a job, it takes longer to get to work using public transit. Buses running late means people clock in late, and that can lead to job loss and instability.

In the Houston region, residents of low-income neighborhoods are more likely to have a public transit stop within walking distance, but they can reach only 30 percent of the area's jobs within a 90-minute morning rush-hour commute - a lower share than higher-income residents, a 2010 Brookings Institute report found.

Houston's jobs are more spread out than in most major metro areas, with the bulk of growth more than 10 miles from downtown, another Brookings study showed.

"The more decentralized the jobs base, the more challenging it can be to effectively connect people to jobs," said Elizabeth Kneebone, one of the authors of the 2010 study.

Research by Harvard economist Raj Chetty shows that areas with less sprawl - and shorter commute times - have much higher rates of upward mobility.

Recent changes at the Metropolitan Transit Authority have improved bus service to low-income communities.

The revamped Metro bus network, believed to be the most significant public transit overhaul in the country, increased frequency of service and enables riders to crisscross Houston, expanding access to jobs, said Geoff Carleton, a consultant who developed the new system.

Before the "system reimagining," about 500,000 jobs were within walking distance of a Metro stop; now, about 1 million are, Carleton said.

The new system also includes routes that run seven days a week, which benefits riders who work weekend shifts in restaurants and other service industries, and places bus stops within walking distance of 250,000 people who live in poverty, twice as many as before, Carleton said.

That still leaves about 350,000 poor residents in the Metro service area without easy access to a bus stop.

"Not having effective transit is a form of segregation," said Jay Blazek Crossley, executive director of Houston Tomorrow, which studies and advocates for urban planning and quality-of-life issues. "If you're required to have a car to be a first-class citizen, that's imposing a huge burden on low-income people."

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Two mornings a week, Maria Ruano takes the Magic Bus to English classes at Baker-Ripley. She calls the driver, waits a few minutes and embarks.

In the afternoons, she rides a Metro bus to her job as a restaurant dishwasher. The four-mile trip lasts about 30 minutes, the wait as long as 15. Some days, the scheduled bus never comes, and Ruano runs late. On those days, her pay is docked for the time she missed.

Rosa and Socorro Castro, Magic Bus regulars, use the service for quick jaunts to the Dollar Plus store and to pick their children up from SER-Ninos. Their husbands take the family cars for work.

Both work as house cleaners in the afternoon. It takes two hours to get to their jobs in the Heights using Metro, cutting the time they have to work – and chipping away at their income, said Rosa Castro. "We have to work like machines."

Narratives like theirs abound on the Magic Bus, which carries about 560 riders a month. On busy days, the bus is packed with mothers and children, who greet Perales with a friendly "Buenos dias, Don Jose" and chatter like old friends. Infants are strapped into the vehicle's car seats and bags of groceries are tucked by the passengers' feet.

So many Gulfton residents use the service that the original Magic Bus broke down about two months ago, after eight years of continuous operation. Until the Neighborhood Centers can afford a replacement, the van is serving in its place.

"I don't have any other way of getting around," said Yeni Gonzales, 34. "Without it, I would just have to walk everywhere."

Using Metro for her errands could run her as much as $10 a week - that's enough to keep from falling behind on the light bill, enough to stretch her husband's $600-a-week paycheck.

"We keep trying to move ahead, but then one thing comes up. Then another," said Gonzales. "I want better for my children."

She wants her three young boys to see their mother do better as well. So, she plans to take English classes and maybe some job training at Baker-Ripley.

To get there, she'll hop on the Magic Bus.