Moving targets

Part 3

by Jason Gay

What makes it even harder for Boston's messengers is that few people understand what they do in the first place. Foremost, riders say, they're businesspeople who provide an essential service. Accidents are very bad for business.

Bike couriers have existed in Boston since the turn of the century, but the profession truly took off here during the late 1970s, following similar explosions in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. The city's first courier company, Marathon Messengers, began as a three-person operation run from a Beacon Hill apartment. As Marathon grew, other outfits followed, and by the beginning of the next decade, downtown Boston was awash in wheel-borne messenger services.

"During the late '70s and early '80s, the amount of bicycles in Boston was tremendous," recalls Jack Avery, a vice-president of Choice Courier Systems, which has done business here since 1978.

Today, the landscape has changed; Avery notes that fax machines, e-mail, and other technological advances have nibbled at the margins of the courier business. But messengering has outlasted umpteen predicted doomsdays, and its survival looks certain. If you are working with legal documents, graphic design, photography -- any field where hard copy is sacred -- then you're probably going to need a bike messenger at some point.

Most of this work is divided among 50 or so Boston courier businesses, ranging from large ones like Choice and Boston Bike Couriers, to midsize companies with a half-dozen riders, like the North End-based Symplex, to tiny one- or two-rider outfits. Almost all of them hire bike messengers as independent contractors, thus avoiding the need to shell out for health insurance. (Scarily, the vast majority of couriers have no health plan whatsoever.)

But it's quite possible to earn a decent living as a messenger. Couriers are paid a certain percentage of each delivery fee, usually between 40 and 60 percent. A reliable bike courier can make $350 to $500 per week, and experienced messengers claim they can haul in $700 a week or more. Full-time messengers work five-day weeks, with the busiest periods arriving in the late afternoon, when end-of-the-day panic sets in.

To stay in touch with company dispatchers, messengers are equipped like Robocops -- armed with alphanumeric pagers, cellular phones, and two-way radios capable of penetrating elevator walls.

Of course, speed remains critical. Gadgets can only help so much; the swiftness of delivery depends largely on the street wisdom and gutsiness of the messenger. Couriers learn to make eye contact with drivers and pedestrians, looking for clues to where traffic is headed. They observe everything from the way a driver grips a steering wheel to the way his shoulders turn; they also rely on a messenger's instinct that Rick Page likens to "Spidey sense."

"It's a dangerous job," says Rhoby Roode, one of the city's female bike messengers. "But it's like any other skill. When you get more experienced, it becomes less dangerous."

But even the most careful, experienced courier admits that to be a bike messenger is to participate in organized chaos. Couriers say they try not to endanger anyone, but they are known to weave through automobile gridlock, cut corners, ride the wrong way on one-way streets, and run the occasional red light.

"It's the nature of the business," Jim Majorowski says. "You just want to get the delivery done. All of us do it."

That is why some Boston leaders are now calling for tougher regulations on the messenger business. Critics believe that a business based upon quick deliveries, commissions, and freelance employees is a recipe for disaster.

The primary issue is stricter enforcement. Currently, Boston's messengers can disobey traffic rules with only the slightest threat of repercussion. The city's messenger licensing program -- implemented in 1990 -- requires couriers to carry licenses and wear helmets, numbers, and vests. But these regulations are largely unenforced, couriers say. Many messengers wear helmets, but numbers and vests have been tougher sells. And riders estimate that roughly one-tenth of couriers are unlicensed -- mostly out of sheer laziness.

More alarming is the fact that almost anyone can walk in off the street and find work somewhere as a Boston bike messenger. There are no city standards or tests for first-time riders. Some larger courier outfits are known for hiring green riders on the spot; even smaller companies, which prefer to use only road-tested couriers, are forced to scramble for warm bodies now and then.

After the October 30 collision, Boston's business community took unprecedented steps to curb wayward couriers. Fleet Bank announced that it would no longer accept or make deliveries using unlicensed messengers. Public relations kingpin George Regan declared that he wouldn't accept bike-delivered packages, period. And the city's chamber of commerce urged its members to use only licensed messenger companies -- and to insist that all couriers carry their licenses and wear their commercial messenger vests.

Certainly, some measured response should follow last month's incident at Commonwealth and Clarendon. But Boston's messengers feel they have been shut out of the discussion. Furthermore, they believe that the criticism from the business community -- which depends on couriers to make deliveries quickly -- is at least a little disingenuous.

"We are doing a job for those people," says Adam Ford, 27, a messenger of four years. "We don't wake up in the morning and decide we're going to go crash into someone."

Back to part 2 - On to part 4

Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.