SOCIAL MOBILITY.(The Talk of the Town)(the New York City bicycle taxi is glorified rickshaw, an embodiment of the widening gap between the wealthy few and everybody else)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 26-JUL-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

One of the stranger sights in the city this summer is the bicycle taxi. Strictly speaking, it should be called a tricycle taxi, since it consists of a strong-thighed young man--there seem to be few women in the guild--on a contraption with a saddle and one wheel in front, pulling a small caleche that rides along on two wheels in back. But to call it a tricycle taxi is to summon images of child labor, and to call it, as it has been called, a "three-wheeled bicycle" lands us in realms of contradiction too confusing even for this contradictory summer. In any event, you can hail the bicycle taxi--or pedicab, to give it its full Avenue of the Americas moniker--at a corner, get into the caleche (or it a surrey? a barouche?), and take it for a ride wherever you want to go, for as long as it takes to get there. Bicycle taxis have been on the city...

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