Pedicabs in Denver's Westword

Wheels of Fortune (Excerpts)
Steve Meyer wants to sell pedicabs to the world — but is the world willing to go along for the ride?

By Joel Warner Published: April 24, 2008

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Some drivers, like Ed Martin, have been doing this for years; for others, this will be their first summer on the streets. Many are hard-core bike enthusiasts, thrilled by the chance to earn money doing what they love; others simply like the exercise. Experienced drivers willing to hustle can take home several hundred dollars for a long night of work. While most have day jobs, a few regulars drive pedicabs full-time, and they make so much cash they don't like to state their income, fearing the IRS may call.

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Dude, you're bad-ass, man!" exclaims the rider when Martin hits the brakes in front of the ballpark.

[Do we refer to you as "Bad-ass Beefsteak" now?]

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Inventor-entrepreneur Steve Meyer hopes to spread that gospel far and wide. The majority of the pedicabs in Denver were made by his company, Main Street Pedicabs in Broomfield, the largest pedicab manufacturer in North America, having supplied about 1,500 vehicles to cities around the world over the past fourteen years.

But the rolling revolution has experienced a few bumps along the way. Many cities have resisted the vehicles, citing safety concerns and traffic issues, while the pedicab industry itself has struggled with casting off its fly-by-night reputation.

But the industry could get a lift this summer when the Democratic National Convention comes to town. Meyer and others hope pedicabs will be seen as the perfect "green" mode of transportation for an event that bills itself as the "most environmentally sustainable Democratic Convention in history" — not to mention a key solution to possible citywide congestion that could make the Rockies' opener look easy.

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That could soon change, however. Greg Duran, the former manager of Mile High Pedicabs, recently split to start his own business, Colorado Rickshaw, with his wife, Teri Robnett. "It's going to be small, it's going to be elite, and it's going to provide optimum customer service," says Duran, who also runs a pedicab consulting company. The operation, which will include city tours and other novel pedicab uses, will be based at what will be called "City Cycle Lodging" — a bike-related garage and office on Arapahoe Street, a few blocks off the 16th Street Mall.

[Uh hem, that's supposed to be City Cycle Logic, but Lodging works too. "Stay at City Cycle Lodging: the place where pedal cabs and cruiser bikes rest in comfort." A little self-promotion, I know.]
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"It's been the pattern ever since the 1950s," Burden says. "There was a serious attempt to rid downtowns of people, to only allow the returning GIs homes in the 'burbs. And streets were built with various incentives, allowing us to build these massive arterials and giving people a huge amount of money to build in a suburban style." The impact has been tremendous: "Forty years of planning has been focused on taking funding away from bicycling and walking and giving roadways entirely to the automobile," he says.

But now, says Burden, communities are starting to rethink their automobile addictions. European and U.S. cities have set low speed limits in downtowns to make them more amenable to pedestrians. Planners are embracing the notion of "complete streets," where, thanks to features like wide shoulders, special lanes and traffic-calming measures, pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists and transit riders all get equal priority. And in their own small way, pedicabs are playing a role in the transformation.

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"The taxi organizations have spent a small fortune in trying to remove pedicabs," says Chris Smallwood, chairman of the London Pedicab Operators Association and founder of Bugbugs Ltd., a local pedicab company, via e-mail. "Authorities tend to shy away from unknowns and, as such, the pedicab issue goes into the 'too difficult' pile."

There's been similar upheaval in New York City, where pedicab drivers are duking it out with hansom cab drivers over rides around Central Park. The city tourist office has said the pedicabs make the Big Apple look like old-time Hong Kong. And in what the Village Voice dubbed "The Great Pedicab War," the city council voted to prohibit electric-assist pedicabs; to ban all pedicabs from bike lanes, bridges and, if they choose, the entirety of Midtown during high-traffic periods; and to restrict the total number of vehicles to 325 because they believed there were too many pedicabs in too many locations around the city. That decision threatened the jobs of at least 175 drivers and launched pedi-protests through the streets last September; a lawsuit by pedicab companies has so far kept the new rules from going into effect.

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But in other cities, pedicab drivers have complained that officials aren't cracking down hard enough. The freewheeling aura of the pedicabs, which appeals to many of its drivers and makes the rides so colorful, can also lead to chaos in cities where rules aren't regularly enforced.

"It's a clusterfuck right now," says Dan Smith, who sold his sixty-pedicab business in San Diego last summer after 400 or so pedicabs — many of them unlicensed, he says — flooded popular urban destinations like the waterfront, the Gaslamp Quarter and around the ballpark. The city, he says, has done little to stop them. "There was no stopping the number of pedicabs coming in, and there was no way to compete with those who were not legally within the country and did not have insurance," says Smith, who's also run operations in San Francisco and Houston. Earlier this month, city regulators in San Diego promised to address the problem, restricting the number of pedicabs in certain parts of the city, but Smith says the measures are too little, too late.

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There's never been a major accident involving Meyer's cabs in Denver, he points out, and serious incidents in other cities are few and far between. "Cars are the killers," he says. "I could run over someone on a pedicab back and forth for ten minutes and hardly break a bone."

[Great line!!]

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So far, the official response has been less than enthusiastic. "Pedicabs will not be allowed within the perimeter," says agent Ron Perea, head of the Denver Secret Service office and of the Pepsi Center's security border, which has yet to be determined.

Nor will they be used by the Democratic National Convention Committee to transport delegates, media or VIPs to and fro, says DNCC press secretary Natalie Wyeth. Instead, the organization will rely primarily on shuttle buses and a motor pool.

The pedicabs' most willing champion may be the Denver 2008 Convention Host Committee, the local agency charged with preparing the city for the event.

"They are gonna be huge," says David Kennedy, the committee's disability-rights coordinator.

But nothing is set in stone, cautions Parry Burnap, the committee's "director of greening," considering that the security parameters around the Pepsi Center are still undetermined, and insurance issues involving the pedicabs and the committee's other pedal-powered transportation system, its bike program (see story, page 22), have proved tricky. "At one end, we have to deal with security, and at the other, we have to deal with liability," says Burnap. "That's just the nature of change in America."

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And if his pedicabs don't get big billing at the DNC, there's always the FIFA World Cup in South Africa in 2010 and the London Olympics in 2012. Lately, Meyer has turned his attention to non-American cities, many of which are less dependent on cars: "I think the prospects for survival are greater outside the U.S.," he explains.

Once production outgrows his Broomfield digs, he may even consider moving much of the manufacturing overseas to places like China, introducing the next generation of three-wheeled transportation to one of the rickshaw's native lands.

[China? Something you're not telling us, Steve?]

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