Survey finds risk runs high for Boston's bike couriers

By Carey Goldberg, Globe Staff, 11/21/2002

As they dart in and out of downtown traffic, calves bulging and brakes little-used, they may seem invulnerable. But Boston bike couriers get hurt on the job even more often than meatpackers and pro football players, according to a Harvard study released yesterday that is believed to be the first to measure bicycle messengers' danger.

Among 113 Boston bike messengers surveyed, 90 percent reported that they had been injured on the job, and 70 percent said an injury had cost them at least a day of work. Overall, for every 100 couriers, an injury bad enough to lay up a rider occurred about once per workweek.

''Everybody says, `Oh, that must be a risky job,' but no one had ever quantified it before,'' said the study's coauthor, Jack Tigh Dennerlein, an associate professor of ergonomics and safety at the Harvard School of Public Health. ''And my other goal in the study was to create an awareness of these people, that they are workers and are doing a job, and deserve more credit than we give them.''

That lack of public favor comes largely from bike messengers' reputation as the renegades of the streets, a reputation bolstered by a 1997 accident on Commonwealth Avenue in which a bike messenger collided with a pedestrian, a bank vice president who was badly injured. The resulting outcry against bike couriers brought a spate of new laws meant to crack down on their daring street maneuvers.

But Dennerlein said that his research indicates that despite the public perception that bike messengers tend to be daredevils, they get injured at about the same rate as recreational bikers.

''What that means,'' he said, ''is that probably the risk is inherent in the bicycle, as opposed to inherent in the job.''

The study's findings, to be published in the December issue of The American Journal of Industrial Medicine, came as no surprise to some of Boston's approximately 400 bike messengers.

''Fortunately, knock on wood, I haven't been injured too badly,'' said Matt Murphy, a bike messenger at Breakaway Courier Systems with 21/2 years of experience. ''There have been a couple of times I got hit and missed a couple of days, because you're shaken up and bruised, but I know a lot of people who break collarbones and break arms, and it's no good.''

The most common injuries among the bikers were scrapes and bruises, but more serious injuries abounded. Five percent of the injuries were concussions. (Only 24 percent of the messengers reported wearing helmets.)

The majority of serious injuries involved encounters with cars, including the infamous experience of ''getting doored'' - running into a car door that suddenly opens. For instance, a courier for City Express ended up in Boston Medical Center last June with head, chest, and back injuries after colliding with a van on Congress Street. Nine percent of the reported collisions involved pedestrians.

Dennerlein said traffic planners must work on separating bike traffic from vehicle traffic.

Only 32 percent of bike messengers have health insurance to cover the medical care they need when injured, Dennerlein's survey found. Also, many are independent contractors paid per delivery, so when they miss work they get no compensation.

On average, Dennerlein calculated, for every 100 messengers, 47 workdays per year were lost to injury. Though there is no national ranking of the most hazardous professions, and though his findings cannot be directly compared with others because the methods differ, his study strongly suggests that bike messenger work is among the country's most dangerous.

Even meatpacking, considered among the most treacherous of jobs, averages only 15.6 lost workdays per 100 workers per year, he noted. And the national average in private industry is only about three workdays lost to injury per year. His comparison with football players came from a long-term study of injuries among the New York Jets.

Mark Cohen, director of the Licensing Division of the Boston Police Department, said that bike messengers also ''need to take a personal lead in their own safety in terms of doing what they can, and I think the first thing on our list is wearing helmets.''

They must also realize, he said, ''that there is no package... more important than your own personal safety.''