February 23, 2003
Zipping in and out of traffic in a big city.
Delivering letters,
documents and packages.
Getting paid $5-10 for each
delivery.
Suffering broken bones and
head injuries?
Such is the life of a bicycle messenger.
Is the job of a bicycle messenger dangerous? How often are bicycle
messengers injured? Are these injuries severe? Jack T. Dennerlein, Ph.D.
(Department of Environmental Health, Harvard School of Public Health)
asked these questions by surveying 113 bicycles messengers in Boston,
MA.
Let's learn about the life of a bicycle messenger in Boston.
These daredevils on wheels work an average of 40.3 hours per week, 8.5
hours per day and make 28.5 deliveries per day. For each delivery, a
messenger must ride his bike approximately one mile. With all of this
bike riding in heavy downtown traffic, you might expect plenty of
injuries. In fact, 90% of the bicycle messengers reported that they had
been injured on the job. Of those injured, 55% said that their injury was
serious enough to seek medical help and 27% of them had to visit the
hospital. For a group of 100 messengers, an injury that caused one of
them to lose work occurred every five days and one that forced a messenger
to go the hospital occurred approximately every four weeks.
The messengers themselves think their job is dangerous. The graph on the
left illustrates how risky the messengers rate their job.
You would think that such a dangerous job would force messengers to take
steps to protect themselves. When interviewed, only 12% of the
messengers, however, said that they always wore helmets on the job and
only 12% said that they wore helmets most of the time. Although cuts,
scrapes and bruises were the most common type of injury, concussions
accounted for 5% of the injuries.
With 47 lost-workday injuries per 100 workers, bicycle messengers have the
highest rate of injuries of any reported job. In comparison, workers in
the meat-packing
industry, who also have dangerous jobs, suffer only 15.6 lost workday
injuries per 100 workers. To add to the problems of bicycle messengers,
many are self-employed and only 32% of the surveyed messengers had medical
insurance to cover their injuries.
Even with email and the FAX machine, bicycle messengers still provide a
valuable service for businesses in big cities. Perhaps there are ways to
encourage messengers to wear their helmets when they make deliveries or
some way to keep messengers and cars from "meeting" each other in the
street. |