A Dying Breed?

 

Curtis Phillip, one of New York’s last remaining bike messengers. Photo by Kay Bonrempo.

In 1983-84 I worked for two small businesses in the same industry. Both are long gone. That, on its face, is not remarkable: Few small businesses, in any industry, last four decades.

I have noticed, however, that none of the other companies that were part of that industry when I was working in it are still in business. In fact, industry itself barely exists and what remains of it is very different.

I am talking about the bicycle courier business. Not so long ago, one would see legions of cyclists, most of them young men, large rectangular bags slung across their bodies. pedaling fixed-gear bikes in slaloms through throngs of buses, taxicabs, vans and pedestrians.

I was one of those couriers, and I saw hundreds of them every day. Now I rarely see even one, even in the Wall Street and Midtown areas of Manhattan.

Apparently, bike messengers like the ones I’ve described are a dying breed, not only in New York, but also in Washington DC and other major cities. Their disappearance has been hastened by the pandemic: Many professionals and businesses still haven’t returned to their traditional downtown office spaces.

But the decline of the bike courier business and bike messenger culture has been unfolding for decades: more or less since I made my last delivery four decades ago. While the world-wide web hadn’t come into existence, there were networks that linked computers within certain geographical areas and industries. And fax machines were already in fairly wide use.  Documents that didn’t require physical signatures could therefore be sent remotely. 

For a decade or so after I left the business, the number of messengers didn’t seem to decline much, if at all. They were, however, getting less work and their pay—whether by the hour as or per delivery—stagnated or declined. From what I’ve heard and read, messengers today make less in actual—not adjusted—dollars than I made 40 years ago.

Another blow to the world of messengering I knew was, if not a direct result of, then at least accelerated by, the pandemic: food delivery apps. When people used them, they discovered that they could get their sushi brought to them for less than it cost to deliver a sales report. They lost what little reason and inclination they might have had to use a messenger service like the ones for which I worked.

Some bike messengers became “hybrids”: They combined food delivery with ferrying documents and small packages to offices. Those couriers, however, found that delivering food ordered on Door Dash or Grub Hub was taking more of their work day. Some quit because orders placed  on apps paid less than their old messenger companies; others didn’t or couldn’t (or didn’t want to) become part of the new wave of delivery workers who ride eBikes or mopeds.

UPS: Coming Full Circle In Toronto?

Some cities, apparently, are starting to realize that they simply can't squeeze any more cars, trucks or other motorized vehicles onto downtown streets than are already creeping through them.

Toronto seems to be the latest such town.  And United Parcel Service might just be realizing that fewer vehicles with internal-combustion engines--including the company's own iconic brown delivery trucks--might be good for business.

The city and the package-delivery service are teaming up in a pilot program involving one delivery bicycle in a heavily-trafficked area.  According to Mayor John Tory (what a name for a politician, eh?), the test vehicle, which carries a large cargo hitch in the rear, won't be allowed in bike lanes.  It will, however, be permitted to use designated off-load zones on some city streets.




Currently, about 400 UPS workers deliver 20 million packages annually on 200 delivery vehicles in "The 416."  What the company learns from the pilot will "determine our strategy going forward" for cargo delivery "on a larger scale in Toronto and potentially to other cities across Canada" says UPS Canada President Christopher Atz.  

His company's officials say that this part of their plan for a more sustainable city.  There is reason to think it will succeed:  It first launched such a program in Hamburg, Germany five years ago.  That city is Europe's second-largest seaport, but like many other European cities, its streets are narrow and some areas--including the upscale shopping district of Neuer Wall--are surrounded by water.  In such areas, therefore, there is no space behind the stores where trucks can make deliveries.

If this project takes hold in North America, it could be said that UPS has, in a way, "come full circle":  It started as a bicycle messenger service in Seattle 110 years ago!

Twenty-Five Years After We Stopped A Bike Ban

Twenty-five years ago this summer, cyclists in New York City staged a rebellion.

In a way, that such a thing would take place in the august days of the Reagan Administration seems ironic.  Then again ACT UP held its first demonstrations that year, and the following year,a riot in Tompkins Square Park rocked the city.

The difference between those demonstrations and the ones cyclists staged during the summer of 1987 is that the latter seemed, on its face, even more improbable than the other two.  By the time ACT UP first met, large numbers of gay men had organized, politically and socially, in response to the AIDS epidemic, which would wipe out whole blocks of San Francisco and downtown Manhattan.  Meanwhile, residents of the neighborhood around the park agreed that the park had become a de facto homeless shelter and a haven for drug dealers, vagrants and loud musicians who had no other venue.  Those residents were deeply divided over what had to be done.  But after the city instuted a 1 am curfew, nearly everyone agreed that officers of the NYPD's Ninth Precinct routinely overstepped their boundaries and, in some cases, committed outright assault and battery.

In contrast, cyclists in New York were scarcely organized at all, save for whatever club affiliations they may have had. Least organized of all were the bike messengers, who were an even larger presence on the city's streets than they are now.  As great as their numbers were, they had absolutely no political clout because nearly all of them were poor (as I was, several years earlier, when I turned to that line of work) and some were homeless.  It wasn't a job for the hipster-equivalents of that time; rather, as one of my colleagues in that business said, we were "the rejects of society," whether or not through our own doing.

Why am I mentioning that?  Well, the impetus for that summer's demonstrations was an action then-Mayor Edward Koch (after whom the Queensborough Bridge is now named) aimed squarely at the messengers.   On 22 July of that year, Hizzoner stood on the steps of City Hall to announce a ban on bicycling in an area of Midtown bounded by 59th and 31st Streets, on the north and south, respectively, and by Park and Fifth Avenues on the east and west.  The ban would take effect six weeks later, in early September, after the signs had been posted and legal niceties dispensed with.

What is truly remarkable is that cyclists who weren't messengers--and people who weren't cyclists at all--actually expressed outrage at the proposed ban.  New York cyclists who weren't messengers weren't nearly as numerous or diverse in those days; to see as many of them unite with messengers--with whom they had almost nothing in common aside from the fact that they pedaled astride two wheels--caused even media outlets like the New York Post, which did much to foment anti-bike hysteria, to take notice,and even to portray messengers' routes as "the sweatshops of the street."

For the next few weeks, hundreds of cyclists--I was among them on a couple of occasions--gathered at around 5:30 pm (just after most messengers' workdays ended, spread across Sixth Avenue and paraded from Houston Street to Central Park, a distance of about three miles.  We pedaled at a snails' pace--about five mph (eight kph) so that passerby could look at us and walkers, joggers and runners could join us. We stopped at red lights and let pedestrians cross in front of us, which showed that we were "friendly" and prevented the police from using the pretext of "blocking traffic" to bust our permit-less rides.  

During that long, hot summer, there were other actions, such as the time when cyclists wended through the East 40s and 50s on foot to show how the ban could lead to pedestrian gridlock.  It had another effect: It mixed gritty messengers with, not only other kinds of cyclists, but with executives in bespoke suits on their way to lunch meetings in posh restaurants.  This increased understanding of, if not sympathy for, cyclists:  While tension between messengers and cabdrivers has never entirely abated, at least they started to see each other as fellow "working stiffs", which helped to create support for safer conditions for cyclists and better working conditions for messengers.

I can't help but to think that the contact between cyclists and non-cyclists led to public denunciations of the ban, which the New York State Supreme Court invalidated on a technicality (The city hadn't published official notice.) for an additional 45 days.  That meant the ban couldn't take effect until mid-October.  At that point, Mayor Koch, who prided himself on his taste for a good fight, threw in the towel.

It will be interesting to see what future historians and biographers say (if, indeed, they say anything at all) about this episode of the Koch regime--and cycling in New York City.  A bas l'interdiction!