Messenger Behavior

Some bicycle messengers behave recklessly or rudely because the job encourages it — to make a living on piece-rates they have to hustle. Because messengers are anonymous, not identified with the company they work for, their employers have little incentive or power to encourage good cycling habits.

The ICA, at its most active in the late 1980s, briefly created a unified voice for messengers through newsletters and frequent rallies. Its “Outlaws Code of the Road” (so named to express messengers' sense of their public image) urged messengers to go out of their way to ride courteously. But many messengers continue to break traffic rules — not to scare or annoy people, but because ignoring the rules seems to be the way of the street, obeyed by motorists and pedestrians alike. Furthermore, experience has led many messengers to believe that these rules were set up not for them but strictly for the control of cars.

After all, more than anyone else on the street, messengers are the victims of New York City's racetrack mentality, dodging motor traffic and vehicle exhaust every day, all day long. Mes-sengers resent being lumped together with cars, which take up precious street space, create pol-lution and wreak infinitely more damage than bicycles could ever cause. The worst that can be said about bicycle messengers, they feel, is that they sometimes scare people needlessly.

Indeed, the number of actual collisions between messengers and pedestrians is extremely small, and it's not even clear whether the messengers are most often to blame. (As noted in Chapter 17: Accidents, the rate of bicycle-pedestrian accidents in New York City is about the same as that for pedestrian deaths from motor vehicles; almost 2,000 pedestrians have been killed here by cars and trucks since the last pedestrian death from a messenger crash, in January 1987. [3]) The problem would easily correct itself, messengers feel, if cars were removed from the equation.

“The enmity between bikers and pedestrians is pent-up aggression based on cars,” says Lund. “Without cars there would be a lot more room for everyone. In a large crowd, people have the ability to get by each other.” The worst that happens, he adds, is that occasionally one person bumps into other, says excuse me and moves on, causing no harm.

The messengers stretch a point — until a day when human-powered locomotion is granted the status it deserves on New York City streets, bicyclists are considered vehicles and by law are subject to traffic rules. Moreover, even without cars, traffic laws would be needed to regulate the flow of pedestrian and bicycle traffic. When messengers — or anyone else — flout the law, they add to the atmosphere of confusion and distrust on the street, if not the actual danger. But the messengers' point about the rightful place of motorized traffic and nonmotorized traffic is one that needs desperately to be made.

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