Bike messengers were once the fastest way to get a document across a city until the arrival of email. Yet even today, in a world with superfast broadband, a few of us still eke out a living, writes cycle courier Emily Chappell
Everyone says work was better five years ago. Five years ago they were saying exactly the same thing. Ever since I first strapped a radio to my bag, people have been warning me that the cycle courier is an endangered species. The internets been steadily chipping away at our workload for the last 15 years, and the recessions only made things worse.
Over in the US, the courier industry died off rather more abruptly, when 9/11 was followed by a series of mail-borne anthrax attacks and Americans developed a healthy phobia of anything that came in an envelope. Rebecca Reilly, who was working in Washington DC at the time, recalls that, We went from a high of 500 messengers pre-9/11 to about 150 in 2005. Its been declining since then, yknow, emails got faster, attachments were like boom!
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via Bike blog | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1oBwwFA
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