A common scenario for a Sacramento bicycle messenger: I enter an elevator in one of the taller office buildings downtown. A thirty-something man in a very expensive suit and glistening hair enters with me, holding a laptop case and perhaps a Starbucks grande et cetera (cliché, but very true). A few seconds into the ride to the 23rd floor he turns to me with a smirk and says, “You a runner? A court runner?”
I glance back and say, “Sort of. I do a lot of court filings, but I work for an independent company rather than a law office. I’m just a general messenger.”
Despite the obvious clues (bike gloves, heavy-duty shoulder bag, short-bill cycling cap, some grease on my right calf), he asks, “So you ride a bike? You’re a bike messenger?”
Maintaining patience, I smile back. “Uh, yes. Yes I am.”
Still smirking, his brow wrinkles and he says, “Huh, that’s strange. Like the kind in San Francisco? I’ve never seen any here in Sacramento…”
At this I can only chuckle and shake my head a little, knowing that I’ve been delivering envelopes to his law firm on the 23rd floor nearly every morning for countless months. The elevator doors open and he steps out first, striding away without another word as if he had ridden all the way up here alone.

It would seem surprising that Sacramento doesn’t employ more humans on bikes. Being the political hub of the wealthiest state in the union makes for an incredible amount of legislative paperwork along with all of the obligatory legal malarkey carried out in private firms and various courts (these are our primary clients). And yet, the bike messenger population in Sac only fluctuates between about 13 and 24 people, split up between six or so companies. To give a sense of scale, for a brief time I worked at a single company in SF that employed over fifty people on bikes. I never even had a chance to meet all of my fellow employees while I was there. That one company could have handled two downtown Sacramentos with bikes to spare.

And it does make sense; 13 Sacramento blocks equals about a mile, so all of these courts and law offices and state departments are squeezed into a square grid two miles in diameter. The bicycle affords quite a bit more freedom of travel through a city environment than a car, which allows us to get from the reception desk at the top of a high-rise to another on the other side of the grid in well under 10 minutes. This ensures that the most time-sensitive rush delivery will most likely make it on time, which eliminates the need for separate crews of short and long-range riders, a common feature of messenger life in larger cities like San Francisco or New York.

Compared with these other places, Sacramento’s need for bicycle messengers is an entirely different beast altogether. The common assumption is that, like other cities, our bread and butter is hauling odd boxes and poster tubes with blueprints inside. But the average Sacto courier resembles a legal secretary far more than a cardboard packhorse. The majority of my deliveries throughout the day involve small envelopes and legal documents to be filed at the state and federal courts. Distributing information packets from lobbyists throughout the offices of congress in the capitol building is routine, and every messenger in town can be found, at some point in the day, standing at the civil filings counter at superior court, debating with a clerk on the particular department an action in a lawsuit must be received in.

Ironically, the lingo of the Sacramento messenger is typically the lingo of the lawyer and politician, which makes for an interesting juxtaposition since many of us do fit the gnarly, unkempt, post-apocalyptic description of the archetypal messenger and are able to carry out legal discussions with attorneys in elevators. However, this is rare; most of them just mention the heat of summer, the cold of winter, or ignore us, preferring to escape from the suit-and-tie over a cell phone call to a golfing buddy. Accepting this, I wait intently for my floor, several paper careers entrusted to my bag.