Manhattan Pastoral

While so many discount them without even trying them, William Neuman actually negotiates a fare and pronounces the machines “oddly bucolic”:

You feel every jolt and bump of the potholed streets. You feel a communion with the pigeons that swoop down and dart just overhead. A yellow parade of taxicabs rushes by close enough to touch. A double-decker bus looms suddenly alongside, seeming, in contrast to your puny status, like a skyscraper on wheels. Look up, and the real skyscrapers soar above you.

But for all its urban grittiness, there is something oddly bucolic about seeing New York from the back of a pedicab. It reduces this most bustling of cities to human-powered speed. There’s an almost tranquil feeling as you float lazily through traffic: Huck and Jim on a raft.

It is a feeling that the fellow pedaling the bike seems to share as well. “It’s a great gig,” Sean Devin, a veteran pedicab driver, said yesterday as he pedaled down Fifth Avenue south of Central Park. “You’re outside all the time. You start when you want, quit when you want, take whatever days off you want. You’re pretty much your own boss. It’s one of the last bohemian jobs left.”

But the unfettered world of pedicabs is about to change. . . .