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)

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 streets for a decade, and there are at least three entrepreneurs hiring them out--the largest is the Soho-based Pedicabs of New York--but they seem newly commonplace in midtown. Unlicensed and unmetered, though not uninsured, they roam the avenues, searching for riders. (Prices are negotiable, but seem to run to whatever the pedaller thinks the pedallee can afford, taking into account how much work it will be to pull him. Price discrimination against the portly is acceptable, and a fifteen-dollar ride seems typical.)

It's hard not to admire the pedicabs' elan as they scoot up and down the avenues, darting in and out of the lines of stolid traffic, the little whatever-it-is in back just squeezing through as the couple from Altoona hold on to their digital camera for dear life, all in a blur of legs and wheels and accompanying obscenities from internal-combustion chauffeurs. Although the bicycle cabs were apparently intended for tourists, their advantages in traffic seduce the natives, too, and a big chunk of their work now seems to involve transporting people who have, in essence, got fed up with sitting in stalled traffic in a taxicab. (The other day, a New Yorker hailed a pedicab for the first time, because she was late for her workout. Pumping hard, sweat pouring, the bicycle pedaller got her to the gym on time.)

To try out a bicycle cab, even in a semi-philosophical spirit, is to be caught up in a rush of exhilaration, embarrassment, and potential significances. Heady and vaguely Edith Whartonish as it is to be pulled around town in an open carriage, it is, at the same time, disconcerting to have someone else's physical labor quite so plainly, quite so clearly and publicly, quite so accusingly, visible as the source of your forward movement. Normally, in New York and elsewhere, machinery and ritual intercede between the puller and the pulled. The taxi- or livery- cab-driver, whose hours, wages, and health-insurance predicaments are unknown to the rider, is enthroned behind Plexiglas, and he has a whole set of rituals (the right-hand seat piled high with personal objects, the endless cell-phone conversation) designed to salve his self-respect, and to give exploitation at least the appearance of self-reliance.

The pedicab is, no getting around it, a rickshaw with pedals. (In ...