Social Mobility
by Adam Gopnik
July 26, 2004
One of the stranger sights in the city this summer is the bicycle taxi. Strictly speaking, it should be called a tricycle taxi, since it consists of a strong-thighed young man—there seem to be few women in the guild—on a contraption with a saddle and one wheel in front, pulling a small calèche that rides along on two wheels in back. But to call it a tricycle taxi is to summon images of child labor, and to call it, as it has been called, a “three-wheeled bicycle” lands us in realms of contradiction too confusing even for this contradictory summer. In any event, you can hail the bicycle taxi—or pedicab, to give it its full Avenue of the Americas moniker—at a corner, get into the calèche (or is it a surrey? a barouche?), and take it for a ride wherever you want to go, for as long as it takes to get there. Bicycle taxis have been on the city streets for a decade, and there are at least three entrepreneurs hiring them out—the largest is the Soho-based Pedicabs of New York—but they seem newly commonplace in midtown. Unlicensed and unmetered, though not uninsured, they roam the avenues, searching for riders. (Prices are negotiable, but seem to run to whatever the pedaller thinks the pedallee can afford, taking into account how much work it will be to pull him. Price discrimination against the portly is acceptable, and a fifteen-dollar ride seems typical.)
It’s hard not to admire the pedicabs’ élan as they scoot up and down the avenues, darting in and out of the lines of stolid traffic, the little whatever-it-is in back just squeezing through as the couple from Altoona hold on to their digital camera for dear life, all in a blur of legs and wheels and accompanying obscenities from internal-combustion chauffeurs. Although the bicycle cabs were apparently intended for tourists, their advantages in traffic seduce the natives, too, and a big chunk of their work now seems to involve transporting people who have, in essence, got fed up with sitting in stalled traffic in a taxicab. (The other day, a New Yorker hailed a pedicab for the first time, because she was late for her workout. Pumping hard, sweat pouring, the bicycle pedaller got her to the gym on time.)
To try out a bicycle cab, even in a semi-philosophical spirit, is to be caught up in a rush of exhilaration, embarrassment, and potential significances. Heady and vaguely Edith Whartonish as it is to be pulled around town in an open carriage, it is, at the same time, disconcerting to have someone else’s physical labor quite so plainly, quite so clearly and publicly, quite so accusingly, visible as the source of your forward movement. Normally, in New York and elsewhere, machinery and ritual intercede between the puller and the pulled. The taxi- or livery- cab-driver, whose hours, wages, and health-insurance predicaments are unknown to the rider, is enthroned behind Plexiglas, and he has a whole set of rituals (the right-hand seat piled high with personal objects, the endless cell-phone conversation) designed to salve his self-respect, and to give exploitation at least the appearance of self-reliance.
The pedicab is, no getting around it, a rickshaw with pedals. (In fact, the second-leading pedicab company is called Manhattan Rickshaw.) It offers, in a pointedly symbolic, Bertolt Brecht-meets-Barbara Ehrenreich package, both the eternal facts of capitalism—the capitalist proceeds from home to office by dint of someone else’s sweat—and the essential ironies of the post-industrial era: the more emancipated we seem to become from physical labor, the more physical labor is left for someone else to do. What Robert Reich has talked about for years, and John Edwards has talked about for the past several months—that the gap has widened between the wealthy few and everybody else—is, in the bicycle taxi, suddenly given a local habitation and a loud bell. The feeling is not even so much capitalist as feudal. You are the lord of the manor, being pulled through the streets on a sedan chair; he is Piers Plowman, in spandex shorts.
Riding in a bicycle taxi, one feels nostalgia for the bicycle messenger of the Reagan era. The bicycle messenger, with his whistle and his disdain, was the embodiment of underclass resentment and underclass style, and of a booming economy, which demanded that documents be here now. As oblivious of stoplights as he was of pedestrians, he owned the streets. Everyone yielded to him, or learned to. Are the pedicab drivers of today happy? Well, they are on their way somewhere. And they will tell you flatly that it is the best job they can find. The pedicab may merely suggest rather than entirely embody the new America of puller and pulled, but it is a sharp symbol of a new reality. It even evokes new metaphors. For instance, the thing about George W. Bush is not that he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. It is that he has been in a bicycle taxi all his life but has not yet bothered to notice that someone else is pedalling.
The puzzling thing for anyone outside America is the conservatism and docility of the American working people. In France, their confrères are off on their five-week paid vacations; in Canada, they have brought a straight-out Socialist party back into a position of influence, because they cling stubbornly to their right to free national health care. In America, though, we are all remarkably inclined to take it on the chin and keep pedalling. The old explanation of this was, essentially, the bicycle-messenger compact: in exchange for hard work and long hours, you got to pedal your own bicycle to a better life. But over the past twenty-five years that compact has been dissolving. Maybe we are having more feudal moments because American life is becoming more feudal. An open, mercantile society is a society run on the bargain of future prospects: in exchange for your subservient labor, we will provide hope. A feudal society is, simply, a society run on the bargain of fear: in exchange for your labor and subservience, we will provide security. Is it possible that some Republican delegate might hop in a pedicab this summer and pause to ruminate on an economy in which some are always pulled and more and more are always pulling?
