Life In The Curb Lane
Neither heat waves, nor rude receptionists, nor ambushes by car doors will slow a bicycle courier on his appointed rounds.
Our fearless reporter found there is plenty of pride in the trade, though not much of a living.
By Jared Mitchell
Report on Business Magazine, September 1988
My short career as a bicycle courier on the streets of downtown Toronto begins as a lesson in humility. A friend assures me I'm physically unfit to work at Sun wheel Bicycle Couriers Ltd., Canada’s largest bike fleet Fred Budan, Sunwheel’s operations supervisor, tells me to dress properly: Shorts must be mid-thigh length and shirts must have sleeves. "You can't walk into First Canadian Place dressed like you're going to the beach," he says, Besides, a scantily dressed, sweaty man can disrupt the concentration of female workers in an office. This at least sounds like an ego boost until I head out on my first calls. Nearly every woman I encounter studiously ignores me.
I begin to wonder what attracts people to a career in the curb lanes of Bay Street. It's not the pay; the average courier at Sunwheel collects less than $10,000 annually, and top producers make only about $35,000, all on commission. For that they endure extremes of weather all year round, perilous scrapes with motorists, sometimes hostile stares from office workers and physical exhaustion. Good couriers are hard to find in addition to stamina, they must have the intelligence to learn the system and keep track of addresses and times, and a thick enough skin to disregard the lowly status couriers have in the business community. You know you're not welcome when you leave sweat stains on the plush chester fields of executive suites.
The couriers at Sunwheel are proud of their professionalism, though few believe in cycling as passionately as Sunwheel founder Hilda Tiessen. Bikes provide so many benefits, she says, "not only exercise but also in terms of pollution and improving the urban congestion." A quiet, thoughtful woman, Tiessen and her partner Barbara Weiner have built the nine-year-old company into Canada’s largest bicycle messenger fleet. Starting in 1979 with a federal make-work grant, Tiessen, a former social worker, slogged up and down Bay Street trying to persuade office managers to use her new service. The first year Sunwheel had sales of only $4,000, but even so, the competition took notice. As Sunwheel began to attract a significant customer base, larger motorized services introduced their own bicycle divisions to handle downtown deliveries.
The bicycle courier business developed in big cities such as New York and San Francisco in the early 1970s following the oil crisis, and it's now reaching its full flowering, a sign perhaps of the frenetic pace of doing business today, The only Canadian cities clogged enough to require bicycle deliveries are Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary and Toronto, Couriering as a whole is estimated to be a billion-dollar business nation-wide; the biggest chunk of the market is in Toronto, where the Yellow Pages list nearly 200 services in operation.
Sunwheel makes 1,500 deliveries a day using 55 men and women on bikes and on foot; with an estimated $1.9 million in revenues, it accounts for a third of all courier bicycles on Toronto streets. Overhead costs are low because the couriers themselves must own their own bi-cycles and pay for all repairs. Unlike motorized fleets that get tied up in traffic, Tiessen’s nimble riders guarantee downtown deliveries in one to two hours. Prices compare favorably with the cost of sending items by taxi. A packet sent from the financial district a mile north to Bloor Street costs $3.70 for delivery in two hours, $5.55 within one hour.
After some lessons on professional comportment, filling out waybills and rules of the road, I am ready to hit the road. First there is a cheque for a scrap-metal dealer on Spadina Avenue. Sweating in 33 degree Celsius-heat after only two kilometres, I arrive and find the deal-er seated at the messiest desk I have ever seen. A horse-shoe-shaped stack of papers rises up to his throat. Then I move across town to a Lombard Street law office to drop off mortgage papers. I am supposed to call my dispatcher for more instructions from there. I can't the telephone in the reception area is being monopolized by a woman telling off her therapist. I head off to my third delivery: a public relations office I once wrote an unflattering article about. They recognize me and take pleasure at seeing me in my new career.
Veteran couriers are more than happy to share their tricks of the trade with me, some of which seem sly and sensible, others merely obvious. Don't, as one new courier did, change your socks in reception areas of Bay Street law offices. And unless you're sure that the doors will open from both sides, never use the stairwells in office towers, You could be trapped in there for hours," says courier Tom Nicholson, 27. In small, older buildings that have only one doddering elevator, wedge your courier' bag in its door so it can't lumber off while you're picking up a package. When passing between a streetcar and a line of parked cars, put your hand on the side of the streetcar for balance. And if a receptionist is ignoring you in favor of her switchboard, turn up the volume on your two-way radio to an obnoxious level.
I quickly learn the difference a good receptionist can make in my day. Most of the ones I encounter are cordial but neutral, and oblivious to the way I'm dressed. Some are not so charming. One of my first is a matron fronting a Bay Street law office who inadvertently reverses the pickup and delivery addresses on the waybill, then glares damningly at me when I arrive empty-handed. When I ask another in a Bloor Street office if I can use her telephone, she claps a proprietary hand on it, as though I had proposed stealing it, In a third office I lean forward to present the receptionist with the waybill and a big dollop of sweat spatters her desk; I try to wipe it away but my grubby fingers leave an oily smear. The receptionist considerately pretends not to notice.
In the sweltering heat, hard cycling exacts its physical toll. Desperate with thirst, I arrive back at Sunwheel at the end of the first day with legs that have turned to jelly. I have discovered the private luxury of pressing my sweaty backside against the coal granite walls of the Toronto Stock Exchange lobby but the relief it provides is short lived.
Even experienced bicycle couriers feel the effects of hard exercise in hostile weather. "You melt down on the job," Nicholson says. Indeed, the back room at Sunwheel is full of underweight couriers, some of whom have lost 20 pounds or more biking. Rail-thin Steve Norlock, 28, recently took a week off work expressly to gain weight. I gained one pound," he says proudly. One obsessive former employee took up the gruelling sport of triathalon swimming, marathon running and cycling while he was still a bike courier. He is best remembered for falling asleep against a hydro pole outside the Sun-wheel offices while locking up his bike.
I sit down to total up my waybills, Another courier is seated across from me, sucking back a giant bottle of Gatorade. He has completed 38 deliveries. David Miller has been a Sunwheel courier for four years and has become its top producer; today he's done 40 deliveries. Mine add up to only 22 but after enduring unbearable heat and thundering traffic I'm pleased with my effort. Pleased until Budan totes up how much money I've earned: At a straight commission rate of 50%, it is just $40.42 for nine hours’ hard biking. I am too tired, dirty and thirsty to care; I just want to go home to bed.
The next day I am determined to beat my previous record. Lunch is reduced to a cheeseburger eaten in a Spadina Avenue phone booth where I am taking down the addresses of new pickups and deliveries from the afternoon dispatcher. Seasoned couriers working with a good dispatcher can handle as many as 15 addresses at a time; novices receive only two or three. The morning dispatcher has already chewed me out for neglecting to pick up a package in the Sunwheel office bound for uptown. It was my mistake, caused by trying to hold the names and addresses of three deliveries in my head at once.
I am becoming increasingly impatient with every little incident that slows me down. On Bloor Street I enter a feverish race with two other couriers for a place to lock up. Like a pack of incontinent dogs, we all dash for the last available tree trunk, 50 metres away The elevators in Air Canada’s nearby offices prove infuriatingly slow. Later, an obese taxi driver on King Street throws open his door, making me slam to a halt "The scariest noises come from a parked car, Tom Nicholson says of his fear of car doors opening. "It could just be settling after a drive on the highway. But still you go by and it makes a click and scares the hell out of you.
Sunwheel insists its employees behave in a professional and considerate manner obeying traffic rules and being polite to customers. Even so, bicycle couriers are among the least-loved workers of the downtown core. Early on I encounter a group of professional cyclists known in the trade as courier scum." Employed by other firms, they ride mountain bikes dangerously fast and wear bandannas around their heads, Aunt Jemima-style, They invariably pass me when I am stopped at red lights. But Toronto’s outlaws are a bunch of Maggie Mugginses compared with New York couriers, who have earned a fearsome reputation for screaming down Fifth Avenue blowing whistles at pedestrians lawfully crossing the street. After many pedestrians were injured by cyclists, New York attempted to bar them from certain streets last year.
Though Sunwheel’s owners try to distance themselves from courier scum, some of their couriers adopt the label as a matter of perverse pride, "It's a rainy day," Nicholson explains. "You've had a flat tire, so you're dirty. you're wet, you're sweaty you're pissed off- that's a given and you walk into an office, Everyone's dressed nice and clean in their corporate best and you realize, 'I'm scum here, I'm courier scum."
As much as Tiessen cherishes the business role she's built for bicycles, her company is threatened by new technology: the fax machine. Already one manufactures boasts in ads that its machines make bicycle couriers "an endangered species." Tiessen’s blood pressure rises when she considers the ad, not because it threatens her business, but because it shows packages flying off the back of a bike. "Our couriers would never be so irresponsible," she seethes. Sunwheel’s owners believe there will always be a core business for bicycle couriers since much of the trade is in original legal and real estate documents and materials for graphic designers.
For many of the couriers, however, biking doesn't provide much appeal as a life long career. Most are between other jobs one recent recruit, for example, is a former stockbroker for Walwyn,Stodgell. Nicholson, who aspires to be a filmmaker, says, "I got this job three years ago as a two-month stopgap. " Although Steve Norlock says being a courier is "the most fun I've ever had working," he admits it has a precarious future. "You start thinking about having a family and think ‘one car door and you're not going to feed your kids for a month'.
Exhausted, sweaty and plagued by a thirst that seems unquenchable, I receive the results of my last day on the road: 21 deliveries paying $44.15 for another nine hours’ continuous riding. There is one final humiliation. Fred has asked the Sunwheel dispatchers for an evaluation of my skills as a bike courier. Not incredibly fast," writes one. Quite slow, writes another Couple of weird route screw-ups. Fred kindly advises me not to take it too hard. I do show potential for improvement, he says. Courier David Miller offers career counselling: "Be more efficient and with a sense of rage, you too can be scum."
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