Wheels of Fortune

Meyer credits that award for his company's success. "I don't think I'd be around today" without it, he says, explaining that he has sent copies of an award-related video made by the Partnership to cities around the world to show them that if Denver officials and business owners have embraced pedicabs, they should, too. He's also lobbied architecture firms to place images of pedicabs in their concept drawings; sent clips of his pedicabs' appearance on The Apprentice to Asian officials who are considering banning rickshaws because they believe they carry a Third World stigma; and courted advertisers, who pitch products on the sides of his cabs.

Meyer is up against decades of urban-planning assumptions, says Dan Burden, senior planner for Florida-based engineering firm Glatting Jackson Kercher Anglin and founder of the non-profit pedestrian advocacy group Walkable Communities.

"It's been the pattern ever since the 1950s," Burden says. "There was a serious attempt to rid downtowns of people, to only allow the returning GIs homes in the 'burbs. And streets were built with various incentives, allowing us to build these massive arterials and giving people a huge amount of money to build in a suburban style." The impact has been tremendous: "Forty years of planning has been focused on taking funding away from bicycling and walking and giving roadways entirely to the automobile," he says.

But now, says Burden, communities are starting to rethink their automobile addictions. European and U.S. cities have set low speed limits in downtowns to make them more amenable to pedestrians. Planners are embracing the notion of "complete streets," where, thanks to features like wide shoulders, special lanes and traffic-calming measures, pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists and transit riders all get equal priority. And in their own small way, pedicabs are playing a role in the transformation.

"I think since we first saw them largely in resort locations, they were assumed to be for resort or tourist uses. But I think that's broadening," he says. "I am convinced that as we get back to cities being very holistic, lively places to be, pedicabs are an indicator species that we are willing to make new, healthier choices on how to get around."

---

"Licensed to Kill," read the advertisement, spread over two pages in London's Evening Standard. It featured a pedicab filled with nervous children and emblazoned with a skull and crossbones. London taxi drivers commissioned the ad last November, making their stance clear as city officials struggled with how to regulate the 300 or so pedicabs in the city — an official conundrum that continues.

"The taxi organizations have spent a small fortune in trying to remove pedicabs," says Chris Smallwood, chairman of the London Pedicab Operators Association and founder of Bugbugs Ltd., a local pedicab company, via e-mail. "Authorities tend to shy away from unknowns and, as such, the pedicab issue goes into the 'too difficult' pile."

There's been similar upheaval in New York City, where pedicab drivers are duking it out with hansom cab drivers over rides around Central Park. The city tourist office has said the pedicabs make the Big Apple look like old-time Hong Kong. And in what the Village Voice dubbed "The Great Pedicab War," the city council voted to prohibit electric-assist pedicabs; to ban all pedicabs from bike lanes, bridges and, if they choose, the entirety of Midtown during high-traffic periods; and to restrict the total number of vehicles to 325 because they believed there were too many pedicabs in too many locations around the city. That decision threatened the jobs of at least 175 drivers and launched pedi-protests through the streets last September; a lawsuit by pedicab companies has so far kept the new rules from going into effect.

But in other cities, pedicab drivers have complained that officials aren't cracking down hard enough. The freewheeling aura of the pedicabs, which appeals to many of its drivers and makes the rides so colorful, can also lead to chaos in cities where rules aren't regularly enforced.

"It's a clusterfuck right now," says Dan Smith, who sold his sixty-pedicab business in San Diego last summer after 400 or so pedicabs — many of them unlicensed, he says — flooded popular urban destinations like the waterfront, the Gaslamp Quarter and around the ballpark. The city, he says, has done little to stop them. "There was no stopping the number of pedicabs coming in, and there was no way to compete with those who were not legally within the country and did not have insurance," says Smith, who's also run operations in San Francisco and Houston. Earlier this month, city regulators in San Diego promised to address the problem, restricting the number of pedicabs in certain parts of the city, but Smith says the measures are too little, too late.