Andrew Weiner is a courier in Boston.

First scene I saw yesterday after crossing the bridge from Cambridge was an old Italian stonemason rebricking a wall on Charles Street. He was balanced on a wooden plank between two ladders, patiently spreading mortar with his trowel. In his wool shirt, leather boots, and newsboy cap he looked so nondescript that there was no time code in the picture he made. It could just as easily have been 1931.

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He wasn't the only one in plainclothes. The police are half-haplessly and forever trying to crack down on the courier business, and yesterday morning they had a sting set up downtown in front of 101 Arch St., by the wall where messengers usually lock their bikes. Posted up between the wall and the door was an undercover cop writing tickets for not carrying a license, wearing a helmet, or having a number plate mounted on the bike. Each violation costs $100 if you can't make nice with the law. Some guys can; the rest just tear up the tickets.

There is, however, a loophole in that these laws only apply to couriers, not to other bicyclists. My friend Thom once tried to convince the cop who'd flagged him down that he was just riding to meet someone for lunch. The cop came back: "But you ... look like a courier." He wasn't buying when Thom told him this amounted to profiling.

As Keystone Kop as this whole operation sounds, it's been going on for almost four years. Bike couriers have been working Boston for over 20 years now, existing in a state of detente with the people who like to wank about how nervous messengers make them. But in late 1997 it occurred to a member of the city school board that it might not be a bad idea to try and cross Newbury Street from between two parked cars. It was. Some rookie rider delivered him straight to the hospital, where he was laid up for most of a month. The papers were all over the incident, City Hall was all over the police, and the cops have been all over the couriers.

Has this made any difference? Depends who you ask. Most riders wear numbers now, and everyone carries ID (most buildings started requiring it after the bombings). Still, most any pedestrian will still complain about how threatened they feel. Of course, they'd probably say the same thing about motor vehicles, and rightly, given that accidents seriously injure three pedestrians here every day. Caution is one thing, but most people ignore the simple fact that a courier wants to hit a pedestrian exactly as much as that pedestrian wants to be hit—not at all.

Part of the problem is that streets in a city like Boston were originally laid out for horse-drawn wagons, so there isn't enough room for all the trucks, busses, sport-futility vehicles, cars, bikes, dollies, and pedestrians to go about their business. There might be if some of these people wouldn't do half-witted things like double-park or walk out from between cars. But some people, alas, are halfwits, and so something has to give. Those at the bottom of the food chain give the most, starting with the pigeons, then pedestrians. And when it comes to self-preservation, the two groups display strikingly similar behaviors. They group in formless unpredictable huddles. When spooked, they fluff themselves up into anxious squawking whirlwinds of ruffled feathers. Only pigeons don't use cell phones, make policy, or file lawsuits.

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