Bicycle messenger
One of the earliest recorded post-war American bicycle courier companies was founded by Carl Sparks, in San Francisco, in 1945.
London's "On Yer Bike" and "Pedal-Pushers" were pioneers of pedal over petrol, and the rest of the city's courier companies followed suit.
By the late 1980s, cycle couriers were a common sight in central London and a British manufacturer named a range of mountain-bikes for them, the Muddy Fox 'Courier'.
More recently, several companies started offering bike messenger services in Central and South America, specifically in México City, México; San José, Costa Rica; Bogotá, Colombia; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Santiago, Chile; Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil.
Messengers deliver digital content on optical media or hard disks because, despite high speed broadband connections, companies find it easier to send a disc than to work out how to transmit larger amounts of data than an email account can handle.
[7][8] Legal documents, various financial instruments and sensitive information are routinely sent by courier, reflecting a distrust of digital cryptography.
[9] Commentators have claimed that technological innovation will significantly reduce the demand for same-day parcel delivery,[10][11] predicting that the fax machine, and then the internet, would render the messenger business obsolete.
The employment status of the bicycle messengers of one of the UK's biggest same-day courier services, CitySprint, was challenged by the GMB trade union in December 2007.
[27] Vancouver, British Columbia additionally requires bicycle messengers to complete a test in order to obtain a license, and to carry an identification card.
Clasps which can be adjusted with one hand (ideal for riding), clips, pockets, and webbing loops on the strap for holding a cell phone or two-way radio and other equipment also feature on purpose-built messenger bags.
Baskets and racks mounted on the bike are also used, and at least one messenger service (in New York City) equips its riders with specialized three-wheel cycles (sometimes known as cargo-trikes), with a large trunk in the rear.
Besides cargo-trikes, many messengers choose to ride various forms of cargo bikes for delivering large objects or high volumes of deliveries.
Messengers have been used in fiction media as symbols of urban living, and have been the subject of novels,[31] memoirs,[32] feature films,[33] television series,[34] comic books,[35] and sociological studies.
[36] Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada created a popular icon of a marijuana-smoking bicycle courier everyman in his 19th-century engravings.
The 2000–2002 television series Dark Angel had the main character Max Guevara, played by Jessica Alba, as a bicycle messenger at a courier service named Jam Pony.
The show took place in a post-apocalyptic Seattle where motorized transportation was costly and therefore couriers were more prevalent and bicycle messengers were seen as a prominent position.
Nelson Vails, silver medalist on the velodrome in the 1984 Olympics, worked as a bicycle messenger in New York City in the early 1980s.
