Wheels of Fortune

But the industry could get a lift this summer when the Democratic National Convention comes to town. Meyer and others hope pedicabs will be seen as the perfect "green" mode of transportation for an event that bills itself as the "most environmentally sustainable Democratic Convention in history" — not to mention a key solution to possible citywide congestion that could make the Rockies' opener look easy.

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The Wright brothers had their bicycle shop. Steve Jobs had his parents' garage. Steve Meyer has a warehouse in Broomfield.

The main factory room rings with the percussion of pedicab assembly: the thump of a mallet striking a Plexiglas shell, the crackle of welding equipment licking the joints of a metal frame. In the basement, variations on the basic form are lined up against the walls: electric-assist cabs with battery-powered motors built into the front wheels, "pedal pickup" utility vehicles with diminutive truck beds in back, oversized "limo cabs" with double-length carts capable of transporting four to six passengers. In one corner, there's a shrine of sorts to these vehicles' ancestors: a rickshaw from Bangladesh with a body so tattooed with vivid seascapes and flying horses it resembles a pinball machine on wheels, and another specimen from Taiwan featuring ornate carved-wood details and a somber cloth canopy. On one wall, above it all, a street sign mockingly declares: "No bicycles."

Meyer, 54, watches the production, his graying hair and metal-rimmed glasses belied by the healthy physique of a bike rider. Like other entrepreneurs, he speaks in a series of anecdotes and offers grand pronouncements about how the world needs exactly what he's offering. A "product of the suburbs," he went to high school in Boulder and earned degrees in environmental biology and resource economics from the University of Colorado. After that, he worked in the real estate development industry and began to question the way suburbs are designed. City codes that required shopping centers to build so many parking spaces that they would only fill up on the busiest days of the year frustrated him, and he hated how the fronts of new suburban homes were dominated by giant three-car garages. He bristled at municipal funding for downtown parking lots. "I don't think the government should build daycare centers for cars," he explains.

Instead, he believes cities should be more like those in England, where people walk to their neighborhood pub, or New York City, where most people would consider the idea of driving to the supermarket downright insane. And he mentions his first, fleeting introduction to the device that would become his life's passion: a jaunt on a rickshaw while he was in India in the 1980s, a ride that was cut short by a blown tire.

For Meyer, the Indian rickshaw was nothing more than a tourist attraction; the technology behind that rickety, hand-pulled cart hadn't changed much since the vehicles were first introduced in Japan in the late nineteenth century. While variations troll numerous Asian cities in huge quantities, it was hard for him to see a role for them in a modern Western streetscape.

That changed in 1990, when, while consulting for housing developers, Meyer heard about a couple of old pedicabs that had been tooling around Aspen. "It's an appropriate technology for these kinds of environments," he says. "It's pedestrian-friendly, so you can have it in pedestrian areas, yet it helps people adapt to environments designed for cars." Since Meyer was helping to organize a pedestrian conference in Boulder with other like-minded planning professionals — the seeds of new urbanism — he borrowed the pedicabs, hired a few drivers and started a temporary operation in Boulder for the duration of the conference to see if the pedestrian-friendly system would work. It did. The vehicles turned heads on the Pearl Street Mall, so the drivers brought them to Denver, where they made so much money that they wanted to keep doing it. Meyer realized he'd hit on something.

He purchased four cabs, leased them to drivers and started Main Street Pedicabs in Denver, where he thought the alternative transportation would fit in well: "Denver was already in redevelopment mode. They'd already completed the 16th Street Mall, so it had concentrated people in a certain area. But it was hard to get from point A to point B on the mall, and it was hard to get to things off the mall," he says.

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While they wait for customers to take to the Rockies' home opener, the pedicab drivers in LoDo talk shop. They discuss handlebar configurations — "I like mine at roughly 45 degrees," offers one. They compare the caches of energy drinks they have stowed in compartments under the passenger seats and trade stories. There was one about a $100 tipper and another about a group of bar-hoppers who battled each other, Ben-Hur style, across multiple pedicabs racing up the mall. "You see some incredible stuff," says driver Luis Cuza. "Some stuff you want to see, some stuff you don't."