A colorful part of the
urban landscape, bicycle messengers are the
modern-day counterpart
of the pony express.
They weave through downtown streets at breakneck speed, undaunted by weather, traffic or the curses of pedestrians they buzz as they dash from office building to office building. Bike messengers are ubiquitous in downtown Cleveland, although their numbers are dwindling as fax machines and the Internet usurp some of their function.
'There used to be about 25 bikers out here,' says Steve Cabot, co-owner of Spokes Cycle Couriers Corp. and a veteran of the downtown Cleveland courier scene. 'Now you see maybe 15.'
In the 'old' days of the early- to mid-1990s, Cabot's customers included travel agents rushing airline tickets to business travelers. 'Now they all do electronic ticketing,' says the 46-year-old ponytailed biker who dispatches from his bike via two cellular phones. Likewise, architects, who once used Cabot to deliver film and pick up photos for one-hour processing, now employ digital photography and computers.
Despite the impact of technology, there are enough signature and multipage documents, legal briefs, and bulky, odd and impossible-to-digitize items to keep bikers such as Cabot and Russ Heidenreich of Bonnie Speed Delivery Inc. in full gear.
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Planes, trains & automobiles
Delivery services cover a wide area with an array of vehicles.
While experienced bikers can zoom from East Ninth and Euclid to Old River
Road in about three minutes in even the heaviest traffic, they're not
much help if you have to deliver a package to Ashtabula or need to move
crates of legal files to Texas. That's why area courier services have
a variety of delivery methods, in addition to bike messengers. Other deliveries
are made by cars, vans, trucks, airplanes and even walkers for short-distance
deliveries of cumbersome packages.
In fact, while Prestige Delivery Systems Inc. puts three bikers on the
streets in Cleveland, local manager Kevin Hart considers them an ancillary
service to the company's vehicular courier business.
'When a client needs a downtown delivery of an envelope or a small package,
biking is usually the fastest, most efficient way of getting it there,'
he says. But he points out that it's such a small part of his company's
overall service that his bikers usually don't even earn back their $300-a-week
guarantee. (Bike couriers get more money if their per-package fee exceeds
their guaranteed draw. However, they usually don't deliver more packages
than they're guaranteed in salary, so the service is usually offered at
a loss by delivery companies to meet customers' needs.)
Much more typical and profitable for Prestige, which has 29 offices
in the Midwest and a network of independent couriers, are city-to-city
trips to deliver anything from a single envelope to a 12,000-pound truckload.
Prestige handles a lot of legal briefs, pharmaceuticals and office supplies,
but, Hart notes, 'it's easier for me to list the things we don't
deliver. I guess we try to stay away from hazardous waste.'
Not quite as nationally focused as Prestige, Cleveland-based Bonnie
Speed Delivery Inc. concentrates much of its business within a 60-mile
radius of Cleveland. Its Web site boasts of a car and truck-fleet service
that will deliver items as small as microchips and as large as a circus
elephant. In addition, the company offers scheduled route services. 'We'll
pick up large volumes of mail from a post office and deliver it daily,
maybe a couple times a day, to a customer location,' says Bonnie Speed
co-owner and president Ken Hardy.
While the aptly named Spokes Cycle Couriers Corp. sticks mostly with
downtown delivery via bike messengers, company co-founder Steve Cabot
would like to further develop its fledgling car delivery business. After
all, that's where
the money is.
'Ideally, I'd rather send someone to Elyria by car for $35 than bike
them downtown for $3.50,' he says.
When customers require motorized transportation, Spokes uses independent
contractors, as do most of the other companies. Cabot's company covers
Northeast Ohio, but most frequently sends couriers by car to hospitals
and institutions in the University Circle area and to the clusters of
office buildings on Chagrin Boulevard and at Interstate 77 and Rockside
Road.
Quicksilver Messenger Service, Reliable Runners and Elite Delivery also
offer long-distance options to complement their downtown bike services.
While courier companies employ a variety of means to deliver packages,
it's another story with the bikers. Bonnie Speed's Russ Heidenreich once
got talked into accompanying a driver taking a van load of legal files
to Texas.
Did it tempt him to exchange his winter bike gig for a van with heat,
comfortable seat and radio?
'It's not for me,' he replies without a moment's hesitation.
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'You can't fax someone a house title or email 40 pages,' says Heidenreich, a 36-year-old courier with two homes, a night job, and a wife and children. Like most of the die-hard couriers who pedal even as the temperature falls and the snow flies, the amiable courier earns a rugged living from his bike seat to avoid bosses, dress codes, rules, routine and indoor confinement. He left his last conventional job as a salesman and interior decorator for an upscale Sandusky furniture store, because he 'got tired of the suit and tie and trying to please everyone.'
So now he's an independent contractor with all the freedoms of the open road.
Well, not quite. Truth is, bike couriers face many challenges familiar to those who work in offices: a highly competitive work environment faced with the threats and opportunities of technology and influenced by an unrelenting demand for greater efficiency and productivity. Add the physical grind and building-security paranoia since Sept. 11, and one begins to understand the life of a bike courier.
Nevertheless, there is no shortage of candidates for the job. 'It's never difficult to fill a position on the streets,' says Kevin Hart, manager of the Cleveland office of Prestige Delivery Systems Inc.
At one morning stop on a brisk December day, Heidenreich taunts a lanky biker from a competing firm about having taken away a major law-firm client. His competitor, who sports two earrings, a neck tattoo and a grin, shrugs it off. 'What are they paying you, a dollar a job?'
When Heidenreich finds that they're both going to the same floor, he volunteers to deliver the package for the other biker. 'The [bikers] don't care,' he says later, explaining the sense of camaraderie among competing downtown factions.
'They change jobs all the time,' says Hart. He's seen bikers come and go at Prestige, as well as Quicksilver Messenger Service, Bonnie Speed, Reliable Runners, Spokes, Elite Delivery and a handful of other couriers. 'But they're very proud of what they do.'
Tuned In
Those who envision Gene Autry on a bike might be surprised to see Heidenreich as he saddles up his black-and-yellow GT Avalanche to do battle with vehicles, pedestrians, security guards, dockmasters and time itself. Although he says he's 'not into technology,' all he's missing is a satellite dish. He has a $100 delivery pouch slung over his back.
Velcro fasteners hold the two-way Motorola radio and the pager he uses to receive alphanumeric assignment details.
He's also got a Nextel wireless device that lets clients go online to track the real-time progress of their deliveries. Heidenreich uses the cell-phone-sized unit to enter the time of pickup and delivery, and the name of the individual who claims the package.
'It can be pretty hard to work the keypad with stiff fingers in the winter,' says Heidenreich, who sometimes gets away with calling in the information via his radio to a dispatcher, who might be persuaded to input the data.
The pouch holds a cell phone, clipboard and manifest, and a lock, air pump, patch kit and spare inner tube for his $1,100 bike. He's wearing jeans and a light nylon jacket that looks modest for its purported $160 price tag, but it offers space-age insulation and moisture repellency.
Heidenreich has paid for the bike (as well as two others that were stolen on the job), the pouch, the phone and all of his personal gear. He is, after all, an independent contractor. He rides five days a week through downtown Cleveland, earning a couple of bucks or so per delivery. Working quickly, Heidenreich can complete 30 to 65 assignments a day; his annual gross is in the low thirties.
He turns on his radio at various times throughout the day to communicate with his base or to hear where the dispatchers are sending Bonnie Speed's other biker. 'I like to make sure I'm hanging out on the other side of town from him,' he says, explaining that he tries to get a coverage area of half of downtown, rather than try to vie with the other biker for deliveries in the same area or pedal for miles to handle a rush job.
It's all a matter of efficiency, the only reason this seemingly anachronistic mode of courier transportation survives into the 21st century.
'You can't get from Playhouse Square to the Warehouse District any faster than by bike,' explains Bonnie Speed co-owner Ken Hardy, whose Cleveland-based company also dispatches cars and a fleet of trucks.
Unfortunately, the tragic events of Sept. 11 have put the brakes on some of the speed, efficiency and freedom the bikers crave. 'Security has added as much as two hours of working time to the day,' says Spokes' Cabot. 'It used to take three minutes to get in and out of a building, and now it takes eight.'
Security was tightening before the terrorist strikes, according to Hardy, but 'the current level has been driving all of the bikers crazy.' The problem becomes apparent during an early-morning stop at the Justice Center, where Heidenreich takes his place in the queue of visitors and employees who wait to pass through metal detectors in the lobby.
'I've seen the line when it went completely out the door,' he says, as everyone drops keys and coins into plastic trays while briefcases, bags and purses ride the conveyor belt under the watchful eye of uniformed, armed guards. Once past the security system and up the elevator, Heidenreich picks up his package in an office of the Cuyahoga County prosecutor.
At the nearby Key Tower, Heiden-reich must use the freight ramp and see the dockmaster for a key card that stops the elevator only at the authorized floor. After waiting several minutes for one of two service elevators, he discovers that his magnetic card for the 42nd floor doesn't work, and he must revisit the dockmaster for another.
Security hassles aside, it's rare to find a bike messenger who doesn't love the job.
Heidenreich meets up with competitors Brian Crolley, 23, from Prestige, and Reliable Runners' Doug Foley, 32, in the plaza in front of the National City Bank Building at East Ninth and Euclid. It's a popular hangout for bikers on break to mingle and check out the 'scenery' —female office workers.
'It's the best part of the job in the summer,' Heidenreich admits.
Couriers are easy to find in a crowd. In addition to the telltale pouch and radio, there's that look: a lithe physique combined with a hip scruffiness. Overwhelmingly but not exclusively male, couriers tend toward beards, tattoos, earrings, stocking caps perched precariously atop heads, and ankles bound to keep pant legs out of spokes. Others, such as Heidenreich, steer clear of stereotypes.
Crolley and Foley are soft-spoken and clean-cut, though Foley has a beard. They admit the economy has given them too much time to hang out, but neither has plans to move on.
'You get to be outside,' says Crolley, as if that explains it all.
At another point in the day, Shawn Lowery, 26, from Reliable Runners, echoes Crolley's comment about working outdoors. Lowery, among the handful of black bike couriers, has been out here for three years and loves it, despite having had two bikes stolen. ('They just pick them up, lock and all, and shove them into a van,' he says.)
Theft isn't all that can turn a good day bad. 'I ran into the back of an RTA bus once,' Lowery adds with a shrug and his customary smile.
Most bikers have been hit by motorists at one time or another. They tell their stories or show their scars like war veterans. Most injuries aren't serious, and some can even be financially rewarding. Heiden-reich says he successfully sued the city of Cleveland when a police officer hit him with his car, and he once managed to get an on-the-spot cash settlement when a motorist damaged his bike while the driver was en route to traffic court.
However, he says of some of his more litigious peers, 'Some of these guys make a living out of getting hit.'
Life Off the Streets
Even Heidenreich, whom Hardy calls 'one of the best if not the best biker in Cleveland,' in terms of efficiency and customer relations, finds time for other pursuits. He chats with his wife via cell phone while coasting no-handed across Superior Avenue in early-morning rush hour. Later, he arranges for electrical work to be done at Great Lakes Tavern on West 63rd and Denison, which is owned by his mother. He tends bar there at night.
He also makes a couple of stops at the counter of the Gardenia Diamond Cafi at East 12th and Superior. There's supposed to be a knockout waitress on duty, he says, but her less-gorgeous brother pours coffee on this particular day.
It's all over at 4 p.m. Heidenreich has pedaled as far north as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, has gone south all the way to Cuyahoga Community College, east to East 55th and west to West Ninth. It's time to check in with his wife and kids, lock up his bike, and grab a quick bite. Then he heads out to his night job at the bar.
At 7 a.m., he'll be back on the streets, sidewalks, loading docks, elevators and offices of downtown Cleveland.