The following is an article which appeared in the 1998 issue of my opinionated, wacky, and oftentimes downright amusing magazine, "The Flamingo Conspiracy." To order my zines (issue #1 September 1997, and/or issue #2 September 1998), please send $3 CASH for each issue to:

All this fuss about bike messengers being a public menace amounts to nothing more than a witchhunt. In my short time as a messenger in Boston, I've witnessed far more reckless pedestrians and motorists than messengers. Admittedly, many messengers speed around agressively, sometimes paying no mind to pedestrians, cars, road signs, etc. I'm not condoning or making excuses for this carelessness, but nobody really seems to consider the immense amount of concentration it takes to weave around traffic, through narrow roads, and around construction sites, all while trying to meet delivery deadlines demanded by the very same businesspeople who complain about us being a threat to their safety.

I can't speak for all messengers, but it is not exactly in any of our best interests to be whizzing around the city carelessly, not watching where we're going. It threatens our safety as well, which is something I never see discussed in the Globe articles about reckless messenger and licensing laws. Nobody seems to care that we suffer injury in these accidents too. And what if, instead of wealthy businessmen like William Spring, the victims of these accidents were homeless people or fry cooks at McDonald's? Would people notice? Would this even be an issue?

My point is that while I'm riding, my safety is the #1 concern. Hitting cars and pedestrians endangers me, too, and I do the best I can to avoid such incidents. (I've never been in a serious accident, only minor scrapes and falls.) But many pedestrians out there don't seem to even care about their own safety; they walk out into the street, not bothering to look both ways, one of the earliest childhood teachings we were all supposed to have memorized by now. They look up at the sky, down at their shoes, talk to their co-workers, even read books and magazines while they walk. Most of them are crossing against the light, many yards away from any crosswalk. They walk slowly and languidly across the middle of the street, not making any attempt to get out of the way of bikes OR cars. They rush around corners with their heads down. They often come out from behind parked or stopped cars without looking, allowing me all of one second to react, and either stop or try to swerve around them with what little room I have amongst all the cars. I end up having to stop and wait for them to cross like ducklings.

I'm really sick of the blame being placed on bike messengers as a whole, when the problem clearly lies with everybody. People complain about messengers not following the rules of the road. Well, I see very few pedestrians following the very simple, common-sense rules we all learned as children: Cross in the crosswalk, look both ways, cross with the walk sign. Very simple, yet nobody wants to follow these rules, and they have to scapegoat a group of people who they consider to be lower-class to excuse them from their own carelessness. Enough is enough. Pedestrians and messengers, if you care about your safety, use your common sense We have to work together on this, it shouldn't be a good-guy, bad-guy issue. We're not out to hurt or kill anybody, we're just doing our jobs. Businessses of Boston, where would you be without us to rush your important documents to and fro?

Messengers now have to be held responsible for public safety. Why can't pedestrians be responsible for their OWN safety too? If I had it my way, people traveling on foot in the streets of Boston would be wearing license plates on their backs. But it's much simpler to blame the minority for the upper classes' woes, isn't it?

-Phuz H. Flamingo

Kill the Messenger:
Fear and Scapegoating in Boston

On the previous page is a letter I wrote to the Boston Globe in response to the articles charting the progress of licensing laws for bicycle couriers in the city of Boston. The attitudes that lay beneath all the law talk were blatantly classist and typical of upper-class whining business people. All the hubbub started with a rich, white, old Federal Reserve Vice President and School Committee member named William Spring, who was plowed down in October 1997 by an unlicensed messenger, and according to today’s Globe (May 13, 1998), the old bastard is still lying around in his bed (probably in the Back Bay) collecting sick pay and "recovering" from his horrible accident with the evil, wrathful messenger. I never saw one mention in the papers or TV news reports following the incident about whether the messenger was injured. Not one iota of concern in the media. The general feeling I got from reading and watching those reports was "One of US got hurt. A businessman. A hardworking, rich white businessman. The messenger? Who the hell cares about that scum?" (To hear the messenger’s side of the story which no Boston paper bothered to print, visit: http://www.wwonline.com/~jhendry/GLADSTON.HTM

It pissed me off then, but now that I’ve been living the life of a bike messenger for a few months, I’m furious. I never really had a reason to write a response about it before, but when I saw the follow-up article today, I nearly swallowed my bagel sandwich whole with the excitement of opportunity leaping into my bloodstream. It was my divination to wake the public up from their sleepwalking and tell them the other side of the story.

Naturally, the Boston Globe never printed that letter. Sure, it was long and windy and spiteful, but it’s an important message that I strongly believe the public needs to hear. Apparently the Boston Globe doesn’t agree with me. They, probably like many other major metropolitan newspapers and other media sources, want to continue spreading messages of derision towards a group of people who THEY believe are at fault, but who are simply trying to make money by doing something they love.

Just yesterday some guy from the Globe snapped a picture of me wading with my bike through a 2-foot deep puddle in the middle of South Charles St. during a heavy rainstorm. Do you think that picture is in the paper today? Of course not. The picture on the front page today is of some woman walking through the very same puddle on the very same street. Clearly there’s a conspiracy going on here. How could they pass up on printing a picture of a bike messenger named Phuz Flamingo, swimming in the middle of the street on her bike, pants and shoes filled with brown water, laughing maniacally to herself? Do you see what I mean? It would’ve been a damn classic Boston Globe front page. The world, and particularly the Boston Globe, seem to have a bias against bike messengers as a class of people.

What I want to know is, how are bicycle couriers specifically more dangerous than any other citizen on a bike? According to Joe Hendry, a Toronto messenger advocate and proprietor of the Messengerville website.

There are no studies nor statistics to show that bike couriers cause more accidents or injury to themselves or others. In 1992, the Automobile Insurance Society of Quebec prepared a study on the safety concerns involving bike couriers based on the "experience, opinions and perceptions of municipal authorities in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Seattle, New York City and Washington, D.C. as well as of cyclists' associations in Canada and the United States." This study concluded that couriers' "behaviour draws attention because their clothing and bag make them more visible," and in fact couriers "have no more of a propensity for accidents per kilometre travelled than other bicycle riders...and for that reason caution is advised in imputing accident risk to couriers in order to justify specific intervention targeting this type of road user."

Now, that having been said, the City of Boston is getting all these ideas about regulating messengers, and their goal seems to be to make us even more visible to that they can better identify, and therefore scapegoat us even further. They’re proposing fluorescent armbands, numbered jerseys, and large, gaudy license plates to put on the backs of our bikes so that Joe Businessman can call the cops to report any messenger who’s riding the wrong way on a one-way street or whatever. I’m not sure if that’s fair. I mean, why just license messengers? Why not everyone who has a bike? Because they wrongfully believe messengers to be more dangerous than the rest of the population, and I’m damn sick of it. Says Councilor Francis Roche in the Globe, "A small cadre of couriers place citizens of the city in jeopardy. When they whizz by you, they startle you. Some… have no consideration." What are the key words in this statement? "A small cadre of couriers." "Some…" So why are all of us being demonized and punished for the actions of the few?

Tuesday, July 7th, 1998. Yet another incident in Boston involving a bicycle courier serves to destroy the reputations of every bike messenger in the city, branding us further as a hated minority. A messenger gets cut off by a motorist in traffic, and consequently gangs up a bunch of his messenger friends to beat the shit out of the guy and his car. No serious damage to either one, just a broken taillight, a few dents, and a welt on the guy’s neck from being hit with either a chain or a U-lock (of course, nobody can tell the difference, and nobody cares because such things are so beneath them). The real damage done was to the hundreds of innocent couriers, including myself, who are now being demonized by the citizens and political figures of Boston. I’ve noticed a big change in the way people react to me in the past couple of days since the incident. People actually look frightened when they see me, whether I’m on my bike or off. Dozens of times I’ve heard whispers behind me or sometimes blatantly right in front of me: "Did you hear about that messenger who attacked that guy?" "Watch out for that bike messenger." "That’s one of those messengers… I’ve heard about them." The first few times I sort of laughed to myself, but come Friday I was rolling my eyes in disgust at the utter arrogance of these people, not only to demonize me, but to do it while I’m still in earshot.

I’ve also undergone a change as a result of this incident. I’ve always tried to be a polite courier who (sometimes) follows the rules, but the last couple of days I’ve been extra careful not to step on anybody’s toes. I’ve been extra polite, always saying please and thank you with a smile on my face to people I deliver to. I’ve been extra mindful to not freak out pedestrians by going too fast while I’m passing by them, letting them go instead of trying to squeeze by them. I’ve been assertive in traffic, using my hand signals and making eye contact with drivers, etc., etc., etc. I’ve gone out of my way to be nice and to be a good, hardworking citizen, and it’s not doing a bit of good, as I realized today, because people are only going to remember the bad bikers in the bunch, never the good ones. Maybe I’m being pessimistic, but I’ll believe that people are being more reasonable in judging bicycle couriers when I stop hearing those whispers.

Just today, I had my bike on the subway, and a nice gentleman came to inquire about the permit required to bring a bike on trains. We chatted about bicycling for a bit, and all of a sudden he said to me, "Those bike messengers, you have to watch out for them, they’re as much a danger to you on a bike as they are to me on foot." After I told him I was one of "those" bike messengers, he sort of stuttered for a bit, and said something like, "When they ran over Brother Spring in October, that did it." They. Not he, meaning the individual messenger involved in the pedestrian accident, but they. Those messengers, those evil people. "Brother Spring," he called the guy who was ran over. What about "Brother Gladstone," who was out of work for an undetermined amount of time because of his failure to obtain a bicycle courier license? Brother Gladstone, who had one of "Brother Spring’s" teeth embedded in his head after the crash. Nobody cares about him.

And who will care about me if/when I get in a bike accident? Who will pay my medical bills? Who will pay for my damaged bike? Not the city, because they only help out the "innocent victims," those who happen to hold occupations other than that of a bicycle courier. Who will rally against the motorist who runs me over, letting the whole city know how dangerous cars are? Who will fight for tougher laws to protect me from such incidents? I don’t see any people in power jumping to the occasion.

Since I’m Queen Procrastinator and it takes me months to write one article, it’s now quite some time after the courier-attacks-motorist incident. Things have calmed down, and I now receive mixed reactions from the public. Of course, nobody expresses disdain for "my kind" directly to my face, probably for fear that I’ll chain-whip them or something (I am, by the way, an extremely non-threatening looking person). Now the bike messenger laws are firmly in place, requiring all couriers to be licensed and insured (of which I am neither). Police may issue tickets to messengers who violate traffic laws, but not to regular cyclists who do the same. Interesting.

Something I’ve been hearing a lot lately are things like, "Are you one of those dreaded bicycle messengers?" To which I just chuckle and mumble in the affirmative. The people who ask these things are usually well-meaning and curious, and occasionally understanding, as many of them (often older men, I find) are cyclists themselves, and know the hardships of urban riding. Many of them agree with me when I express my scorn of the bike messenger laws. My regular customers all know and appreciate me, and smile when I walk in the door. People ask me for directions all the time, and I always respond helpfully and politely. Imagine their surprise. I also serve as a weathergirl for the poor unfortunates who are cooped up in their offices all day, unaware of how beatiful or horrible the weather is outside. Overall, I’m getting more positivity than negativity, and the trend of scapegoating bike messengers seems to have worn off. I still don’t agree with the new laws, but my 2-wheeled companion and I will ride on, always watching out for bored cops ready to bust a gal for doing her job.

Back To The Licensing Fiasco
My Bike's Story
Becoming One
Getting a Better Gig
Diary of # 177
Messenger Links
E-Mail Me

---

This page hosted by Get your own Free Home Page