The Two-Wheel Haul

Photo by Lisa Healey, Courtesy of Pedal People

On any given day in Northampton, Massachusetts, you might see something that would raise eyebrows elsewhere: Someone on a bike, pulling a giant trailer heaped with trash. You'll see this in rain, snow, or heat and humidity; on residential streets and on Main Street; even going uphill in traffic.

Since late 2002, the Pedal People have picked up and hauled more than 341,000 cubic feet of trash, recyclables, and compost, replacing big loud fuel-burning garbage trucks with...bicycles (at prices competitive with the trucks). It's not a viable model everywhere, and nobody's getting rich doing this, but it's the sort of carbon footprint-reducing business we should look at as a model for the places it would work.

You might think a bicycle hauling business wouldn't be viable everywhere because of weather -- that it would only work in extremely mild climates. But Northampton gets snow in the winter and has real summers, and the Pedal People rarely delay pickups due to weather. In fact, perhaps the biggest reason the business is viable in Northampton and not elsewhere is that Northampton doesn't have municipal garbage collection: everyone either hires a private service or takes their own garbage to a transfer station.

Their example, though, shows that local bicycle hauling businesses can work day-to-day for loads up to 300 pounds (the capacity of their trailers). That means that grocery delivery, small moving jobs, composting, and other things that might otherwise mean a car or truck trip could be turned into a bicycle business. In this case, perhaps the most exciting thing is that the city of Northampton has responded, hiring them to pick up trash from public trashcans in the downtown area.

I had some questions, which they were kind enough to answer. (You'll see that there are answers from both Alex and Ruthy, the founding Pedal People.)

What were some early challenges in getting started?

Initially when we called the city to ask about hauling trash to the transfer center on bicycles, the person who answered the phone said, "You want to what?!" And we were told we'd have to take it out to the landfill, which is 7 hilly miles away. We then spoke with Karen Bouquillon, Northampton Solid Waste Coordinator, and she said, "I think that's great, and the city needs more businesses like this." She gave us permission to take things to the transfer center and she sent us a free permit sticker for our bicycle trailer.

That year the bike path wasn't plowed so we had to travel on some hillier streets. Sometimes it was really hard and I (Alex) didn't know if this was a good idea. We didn't have the waterproof overshoes, face masks and mittens that we have now and cold extremities and overheating was a problem for me. It was also really hard work at times! But it was a lot of fun to be out there defying people's expectations about what a bicycle with a trailer (and person!) can do.

I know when you came to my parents' neighborhood, there was some skepticism about your ability to work through the winter. How did you overcome that?

We overcome people's skepticism by just doing the job. Initially there were a few folks willing to try us out, and then others signed on as they saw that it was possible. When we first started, we weren't sure it was possible, and we started the business in the winter to make sure.

Speaking of which, what is the hardest kind of weather to do it in? Does everyone agree on that, or do different people have different least-favorites?

I think the general consensus is that Spring and Fall are the easiest times. Some folks love the winter even though it's often physically more difficult because of the condition of the streets. Some have a hard time in the heat of the summer, because you can only take off so many clothes, while in the winter you can always add more.

Do you know of any similar businesses in other places?

Bikes At Work, the company that makes our trailers, was our inspiration. For many years they did all the recycling for the University of Iowa at Ames with the same style of bike trailers that we use.

There is a compost collection service in Goshen, Indiana, and a recycling/compost/hauling service in Philadelphia.

I know that this is possible here because Northampton doesn't have a municipal trash pickup and most people hire private collectors. Do you have a sense of how many other places there are where a private, bicycle trash collection would be viable?

Not too many places. I think there's a market for compost pickup in a lot of places, at least until municipalities start picking it up.

You collect trash in downtown from city trash cans. How did that come to be?

We signed a contract with the City of Northampton to pick up trash from the 70 or so public barrels downtown in June of 2007. This was an exciting development for us, and a huge commitment. The barrels have to be emptied (or checked) 7 days a week, 365 days a year. But this potential contract actually came up 2 years earlier.

It was in 2005 that Bill Letendre, head of Parking Division for the city, approached us and said, "I want you to submit a bid for this contract." At that time there were 5 of us doing Pedal People, and we didn't know if we had the people power to take it on. Nor did we know exactly how we would do it. We said, "We don't even know how to begin to bid on this, so why don't you let us do a trial run for a week?"

Bill said "Sure," so we rigged up a trailer special just for hauling downtown trash. At the end of the week, we came up with some numbers for a bid, but we actually weren't even sure we could do it without exhausting ourselves.

Before we got a bid formalized, Bill said, "By the way, the City requires that all of its subcontractors have liability insurance." We didn't have liability insurance, and had no desire to get it - partly because of the cost, and partly because it seemed fallacious to base one's economic security on an insurance company. Our economic security is based more on our relationships with people in the community. So we had to come to consensus amongst ourselves about if we wanted to compromise our values and get liability insurance. Meanwhile, the deadline for submitting the bid came and went.

Bill said, "Maybe next year." I (Ruthy) was actually a little relieved because I didn't know if we could pull it off. Furthermore, we hadn't yet incorporated as a collective (though we were functioning like one), and our legal structure was in limbo. The looming potential of a contract with the City was a major motivating factor in us deciding to hire a lawyer to help us get legalized as a collective, which happened in January of 2006.

In the summer of 2006 Bill said, "This contract is coming up for bid again; you should submit one." We said, "Okay, we'll see what we can do."

Fortunately we already knew how much time it would likely take us, and what the math for the contract would be. So we just had to figure out the liability thing and if we had enough people to do it. We were estimating it could take us up to 4 hours a day. For us, with the part-time nature of our work, that would mean bringing in probably 3 or 4 new people. But how do you know who's a solid person to bring into the collective unless they're tried and true? Most of the current members of the collective already had about all the work they wanted. So if we brought in a few new people, and they didn't work out, the other collective members would be scrambling to fulfill the contract, and we would exhaust ourselves.

Sometimes the structure of the collective is a little tricky, because everyone who's doing work is also a decision-making member, but our work is so part-time (4 hours/week minimum), yet even doing 4 hours of work a week requires you to come to a meeting every other week. Most Pedal People do one to three 4-hour shifts of riding/hauling per week. And the work is so physically demanding - it's not like you can just work 5 days a week if you want to. So if someone is sick and needs a sub, it can be hard to find another Pedal Person with the time and energy to sub. And it's not like a job where if someone doesn't show up, everyone else sort of covers. No, if you're sick, you'd better find someone to do your route, or all your customers will be calling.

So, because of the strenuousness of the job, to suddenly add 7 more shifts per week to the Pedal People workload would be a big jump. Anyway, we figured we would go ahead with pursuing the city contract. And we decided that sacrificing our ideals and buying liability insurance would be offset by the goodness that would come from potentially being able to pick up our downtown's trash on bicycle. Besides, the city would be paying for it, built into the contract.

We called up a few local insurance companies to do the dirty, but much to my (Ruthy's) surprise, they said, "We can't find a carrier who'll offer you insurance." I was confounded. They'll offer liability insurance to garbage companies using trucks. We must be really dangerous! It took months before we found an insurance company that offered us insurance. Meanwhile, the deadline for the downtown trash contract had passed again.

Bill said, "This contract is going to come up for bid again next summer. Get your ducks in a row."

Finally in May of 2007, we had the insurance lined up, and we had grown enough so that adding 7 more four-hour shifts to our business wasn't as overwhelming. And we had 3 or 4 new people who seemed solid and eager to come into Pedal People to take this on. We submitted the bid, and received the contract. We came in cheaper than the other trucking company that submitted a bid. I don't think any of the other trucking companies really wanted the contract - having to stop and get out of the truck every 20 or 30 yards for a garbage can, and working either in low-traffic times like 3 or 4 am or else working around parked cars and pedestrians.

We actually just take the trash to a compactor right downtown, no more than 4 blocks from the farthest can, and the city contracts out with a trucking company to empty the compactor.

Since we work on bikes, we can do the trash shift any time of day we want without being as affected by the traffic. And for the more social pedal people, we can dilly-dally with the cans and talk to friends and inquisitive onlookers while we're working. For us, it's kind of like being on display as a professional athlete, and for the city, they love how it enhances their reputation as a "progressive" town with a people-friendly downtown.

It seems to me that other downtowns could emulate what we're doing, but I haven't seen it happen yet. Give it time.

Photo by Alex Jarrett, courtesy of Pedal People.

If you have further questions, please ask -- Pedal People has registered an account and they said someone would try to put in an appearance here tonight (though possibly not immediately).