[While in Cuba last month, a colleague and I walked and walked throughout
old Havana for days, but just could NOT bring ourselves to use one of the
many “bicycle cabs” used as a frequent mode of transportation
there. Besides all of our “cash” went to magnificent concerts and
tipping the many wonderful musicians throughout the city…and for salsa
and merengue lessons :).]
"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?"
The New Yorker
SOCIAL MOBILITY
by Adam Gopnik
Issue of 2004-07-26
Posted 2004-07-19
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 manthere seem to be few women in the guildon 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 taxior pedicab, to give it its full Avenue of the Americas
monikerat a corner, get into the calèche (or 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 outthe largest is
the Soho-based Pedicabs of New Yorkbut 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 capitalismthe capitalist proceeds from
home to office by dint of someone else’s sweatand 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 monthsthat the gap has widened between the
wealthy few and everybody elseis, 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?
- Re: SOCIAL MOBILITY Diane Monaco
- Re: SOCIAL MOBILITY Tom Walker