Ride Boulder Co

Business by Bike…Brave

Posted on 12. Oct, 2009 by Jennifer in Uncategorized

(image from BikePortland.org http://tinyurl.com/yhhj4a4)
I have been reading a number of blogs and tweets (?) recently about people doing business by bike and I know I am probably romanticizing it but it sounds like such great fun. Delivering pastries, soups and coffee by bike….creating a business vibe or culture, where the biking element is a central theme to your identity. Would I be as excited to receive homemade soups and coffee from a van? Maybe but I think the uniqueness of a “bike shop” is what would encourage me to go and check it out.

Of course, if the weather looks like this and is not above freezing, I don’t know how much fun it would be to be on the bike delivering goods. But perhaps that’s all part of it. I remember my grandmother telling me about how the butcher and milkman used to take her order once a week and then deliver her groceries on the weekend. I don’t know if they delivered by bike but what I find interesting is that perhaps in some small way maybe we are returning to that type of interaction.

The Bike Basket Pies delivers fresh, home-made pies to you in San Francisco. I have no idea what the pies are like but I follow her on twitter and she always seems to be sold out. Cafe Velo in Portland  uses a bakfiets to sell dripped-to-order coffee. You can read more about it at BikePortland.org. Then there is Soup Cycle, a bicycle-delivered soup business in, you guessed it, Portland. In some cases, it sounds like these business are trying to use local ingredients for their dishes and, of course, their business is all local. I guess in some ways it is true that “Small is the New Big” and is going by bike.

So, I read about these amazing people doing some pretty brave (starting a business) things in a way that I truly admire. And I think how fantastic that would be to cart my business around in a cargo bike, enjoying the weather and serving products I really believe in. And so I gloss over the fact that my mom probably could not ride her bike three blocks to the grocery store without getting hit by a car.  I tuck memories of ghost bikes and other stories of injuries in the back of my mind and wonder if it is really possible that we could move in a direction where you can not only ride your bike but ride in a safe enough environment to conduct business.  I hadn’t intended for this post to end on a downer but this story has stayed with me of a couple run over in Helotes (near San Antonio where I am from ) http://www.tucsonbikelawyer.com/heavy/

Yes, people have car accidents all the time but when a cyclist and a car collide the outcome is rarely a minor fender-bender.