bike messenging

exterminate all rational thought said:

thanks Robert, very good stuff. but this news about the required running of
lights is too bad. you see i want to try to do something different one or
two days per week to get away from what i do now which is basically watch
people die (harborview). and im tired of seeing CHI S/P bike vs (pole, car,
ped, sidewalk etc.) the reason it hasnt been me is because i keep myself
seen and safe. again thanks for the help. keep safe!
-alan

Alan, I appreciate your safety-first mentality, which,
you may be surprised to learn, is something you and I share.
I too have seen plenty of people, friends, lying in
hospital beds, seriously injured, maimed for life, and I
have no desire to go that way myself.

Keep in mind that when an experienced rider is injured
in a car-bike collision it is statistically likely that
the rider was riding lawfully and was not 'at fault' in
the collision. Most of these wrecks involve a driver
who fails to notice a cyclist, while, in turn, the
cyclist fails to notice this failure to notice. So you
see it is really the cyclist's awareness, not his
adherance to traffic law, that is the critical factor
determining whether or not he gets crunched.

I believe it can be shown that rolling through red lights
is statistically safer than rolling through green lights
for experienced adult riders. This is because adult
riders tend to approach red light running with a heightened
sense of awareness, whereas they tend to approach greens
in a state akin to REM sleep. And the hazards associated
with green light intersections--right hooks, cars turning
in front of you or into you from the right and left,
light runners, jaywalkers, failures to notice the cyclist
from all sides, the fun never ends--demand a heightened
sense of awareness also. Bike messengers run reds on
a constant basis, yet if you made some sort of tally you
would find that they are injured more often under green
lights than red ones. Myself, I've busted about a half
million red lights, literally, and never been touched.
My only serious car-bike collision came when I was
riding in a completely legal and proper 'vehicular'
fashion.

You wouldn't have to ride packages for very long to
realize that red lights can be had as safely as greens
(or, green lights are just as dangerous as reds) and that
'keep myself seen' is a horribly limited strategy for safe
cycling. Ultimately, there is only so far that 'keep
myself seen' can get you, then you're on your own.
If there is anything that being a bike messenger will
teach, it's that motorist vision and capacity to notice
cyclists is fundamentally unreliable, and that it's
ultimately up to the rider, plain and simple, to find
a way to deal with this reality and thus stay out of the ER.
You have to ride in such a way that dependence on motorist
vision is absolutely minimized. Don't put your eggs in
that basket. Following traffic laws and striving for
visibility to others may be good and joyful things,
but they really have very little to do with staying out
of the ER.

So I say get that messenger job. Run those lights. Be
careful, no matter what color they are. Have fun.

Robert

Geezer Boy said:

This is all fascinating. May I be so rude as to ask what these better
jobs pay

Just enough to move into a nice neighborhood, make
the neighbors nervous, and depress the property
values.

Quoted message said:

many hours per week work?

Varies. I do four days, about 35 hours. Wednesdays,
Mondays, or Fridays are the best days to take off,
in that order.

R

greggery peccary said:

hey i'm thinking about applying to work as a messenger. i know there are
some of youse who do this and could use your worldly advice. are these jobs
hard to get? i am thinking it could be fun because i love riding downtown
and im pretty good at it. im not a racer but in good shape. i do follow the
traffic laws (unlike most messengers ive seen). are there some services in
the seattle area that are better than others? years ago i was a super
shuttle driver in la and didnt like the dispatch favotitism there. can i
avoid this?
-alan

ok, I'm not a messenger, but this [censored] me off and probably would
really infuriate one:

http://www.nike.com/nikelab/time_travels/index.jhtml

Robert,
What's your take on this?

\\paul

--
Useless Note: I really can't stand Nike. As a musician, I watched them
rip off a Minor Threat (one of the most influential punk bands) album
cover buy changing the red/black image to blue/black, changing "minor"
to "major" (the name of the skateboard tour was "Major Threat), and the
kicker: putting Nike swooshes on Ian Macaye's shoes. Nike's labor
practices and they indulgent consumeristic nature surround their
products is something that Minor Threat and especially Ian's later band,
Fugazi, really spoke out against. Needless to say fans of the bands
(skateboarders, funny enough) spoke out loud enough against the poster
than Nike pulled it.

Paul M. Hobson
Georgia Institute of Technology
..:change the words to numbers
if you want to reply to me:.

Paul Hobson said:

Robert,
What's your take on this?

I was not infruriated. Mildly annoyed maybe. I do
hope the guy in there, if he is a real messenger,
got some real cash to be exploited and embarrassed
like that.

I don't think we've seen the peak of corporate
America's appropriation of messengers and messenger
images. They are always about 15 years behind.

I think/hope we will start seeing more elaborate footage
of pro messengers' smooth riding in traffic which was
hinted at in the Lucas Brunelle alleycat videos. It
warms my heart to see old pros doing their thing--can't
fake that.

Robert

Greggery, most of what the experienced messengers have written seems
true to me. I worked for Quik Trak in Manhattan (quik-trak.com) for the
summer of 1997 and can honestly say it was the most fun job I have ever
had. It was the summer after my sophmore year, my dad had just moved to
the city for work, and I had nothing to do. I flew up, and within a
week I had a job.

Here are my thoughts: I got a job pretty quickly for a number of
reasons. I showed up in bike garb -- they said later that they could
tell I was a cyclist. Also, many of the people whom Quik Trak employed
at the time seemed to me to be the transient type -- so they always had
openings. Don't get me wrong, QT definitely had some hot shot riders
like the ones who have been posting to this thread, but there were only
a few of those. What they saw in me I guess was a responsible,
well-educated guy who was going to show up on time and do the best he
could. They did know that I was new to the city, but that was OK.

Of course, that meant that I didn't make much money for a while. Also,
I should say that I wouldn't have been able to make it if I had been
covering all the bills. Being able to crash at my dad's helped,
obviously. At that time, Quik Trak paid on a 50 percent commission.
Back then their base charge was $7.50 per package, so the rider's take
would have been $3.25 for that delivery. But the real money came in
when it was out of your home zone, or if it was a "double" or "triple
rush," or if it was a night rate package after 5 pm. I remember some
deliveries costing the client as much as $50, so my take was $25 just
for that one item.

Being new, I definitely didn't get the best jobs. My dispatcher was
kind and courteous to me, but I know he had riders on his roster he was
loyal to. That's OK, over the course of about 6 weeks I know I had
proved myself to be reliable, and that helped. I probably averaged only
$70 per day during those first weeks, but later on I was able to clear
$100. My biggest day was around $170 and about 33 packages -- I was
exhausted.

Some fun memories were: riding up Riverside Drive to Harlem; delivering
ice cream to the set of Regis and Kathy Lee; learning to hold on to
trucks; learning a good trackstand; delivering to the World Trade
Center.

Of course, there were really bad days, too. The first week I wanted to
quit. I could have killed myself a couple of times. Once my chain broke
when I was, foolishly, riding between two buses. I was hit by taxis
three times, one time taco-ing my front wheel, but never getting
injured somehow. I learned a LOT about in-traffic riding.

Now that I am a struggling singer who teaches college, I often remember
my messenger days with great pleasure. You should definitely give it a
try. There's nothing to lose, right?

Best wishes,
Oliver