A company coming home..

Rebecca Crawford is a designer who turns out some great stuff, she's been based in Cornwall for a while and now she's coming home. Have a look at some of her stuff if you get the chance, its green and very cool! Pedicabs are thinking of asking her to decorate our shiping container!! You can find it here

Howies

I dont know if you guys know about Howies, there a great company, all organic and forward thinking with really great values based policies.

They added a bit to their blog about us today if you go to their website - click this you will see this on the bottom right.
Have a click about the site, lots of you have asked about where we got our t-shirts, you can pick them up there.

Thanks Howies, especially Poppy and Anja

Will

Who will be the 1000th customer???

Well what a weekend we’ve had!

We had the best part of 400 customers between Friday night and Sunday afternoon, incredible! Which means in three weeks we’ve helped almost a 1000 people to get about town!!

Next weekend will see our 1000th customer! There is a treat in store for them, we’re not telling yet but it’s going to be good!

In a few other stats for you the highest speed clocked so far has been 27 mph and the heaviest haul, including the rider and weight of the bike, has been 420kgs! Not far off half a ton!

It’s still great fun and thanks to all of you who’ve ridden in, tooted at, waved at, let in to traffic, or just smiled at a Pedicab!

Single Speed Bikes

So, I think its fair to say that Pedicabbing is having a strange effect on me. Never have I been more motivated to turn the pedals, to dig deep when my muscles and lungs are screaming to stop.

It's amazingly rewarding to get someone from A to B, to have been the engine, to have felt the bumps, the lumps, the strains, shared the smiles on the downhills and the silences in converstion that accompany the uphills.

To turn around at the end of the journey, wipe the sweat from my brow and chirp ' just tip what you thought it was worth' is just something else. Real worth, real value, a real appreciation of what energy it really takes to get people about, so what has this got to do with single speed bikes?

Well, single speed bikes and more to the point fixed wheel bikes (fixed means that you cant freewheel, the pedals always go round) appear to be the ultimate connection to travelling on a bike. And i am getting to like the idea, super simple, one gear keep the momentum up, slow the bike with your legs (no brakes) speed the bike up with your legs.

So now i'm in the process of thinking about, putting together one of these bikes. In my head it looks like this- Old British steel frame, Mercian or something like that, short wheelbase, tight angles, maybe an old track bike. Fixed gear on the back, a gear you can just spin out on the dowhills but not too much to get going. Courier type look, maybe some practical features, mudguards, a panier rack.

I'm really interested to hear from anyone who rides a single speed or who may be able to point me in the right direction, should be exciting!

Will

Great weekend and photo shoot!

Another 300 customers sampled what it's like to ride in a pedicab last weekend! Which means a staggering 600 so far!!

Amazing stuff eh? It wasn't really even that busy and we were doing a fancy photoshoot for most of Saturday! Thanks to Leon for that!


In other news we now have an arrangement which lets us go through select areas of the Catherdral. It really opens up things for us, and for tours it's great as we can visitors to Hereford all over the place.This weekend should be a busy one we think, especially in the evenings.

Pedicabs will always be the main thing for us although just for the minute our attention is turning to the possible provision of a cargo service- herefordpedicargo, that will enable a low cost green courier service between various industrial areas in Hereford. Not to mention potentially getting post to depots and legal papers to the courts. We would love to hear your thoughts on this and our inter office travel scheme. Please either drop us a line (linked from the front page of our website) our lovely website or leave a comment on the blog, would be good to strike up a bit of banter and hear your ideas!

Hope all is well with you lot and if you haven't been on a cab jump on this weekend!

Will

Video on the blog!

Howdy all,

It's taken a bit of doing but if you look at the main page of the blog there is a link to a video on the top right!

Pretty cool eh! We are just gearing up for our second weekend in town, we're pretty excited, there's a chap coming to do some photos and we're also doing our first wedding!

Hope to see you riding in the back some time soon!
Will and Ben

Famous!!

We were on tv last night! BBC Midlands Today, only a little bit! For those of you who want to check out another good vid there is one here- http://www.herefordtimes.com/news/vnews/

Will

Look… we are doing it!!!

Well here we are the Monday after the first weekend, we covered over 220 kilometres and took over 300 customers, we worked in the nights and in the days, around the pubs, taking tourists on tours, dropping people home, you name it we did it!

We sweated buckets, ate like horses and put some serious effort into riding and we loved every single minute of it!

It started last Thursday night with our launch

We drew a big crowd and got a lovely response from everyone, I took my first customers for a ride!
Generally we had a fantastic time, spoke to lots of people who were supportive of what we have started and who wished us well. It was incredible, absolutely incredible, to think that we created something like this, put our minds and our hearts in and got this far in such a short amount of time. For a while we hadn’t seen it from other peoples eyes and this was a big eye opener.

So on Friday we started our first night in town.

It was really quiet until 10pm and then it was manic, we didn’t stop! Loads of short journeys and lots of people amazed at the new service available to them. It was a long night though and the legs were burning by the time we finished.

Saturday morning we eased ourselves in, tourism trips and things like that, stopping occasionally to rest up, chat to punters and soak up the atmosphere.

Saturday night was incredible, from 7pm we were rammed and it didn’t stop right through till midnight, the doormen were a great help telling people about our service and genrally spurring us on in our dark moments when the legs wanted to give up! The punters loved us we took hen parties.

Some loads were heavier than others.

But generally they all had a great time.

We cycled home that night with legs burning and lungs panting but with giant smiles on our faces, happy to have supplied a brand new service that was immediately popular and for it to have been so much fun.

Sunday morning was a low point for our bodies! Things needed to be done to keep us going, Ben snapped me ‘talc-ing up’, something which I believe was a life saver!

My mum had been a gem and dropped some flapjacks off for us on Friday night, those oats really kept us going so a big thank you Mum. We headed into town then and had a great day with the tourists and kids, we worked hard and loved the weather, all in all a great weekend!

So there we have it, we are up and running and its working, people love the service, they love the policy on tipping and we feel the same. As it has been from the start FUN, GREEN AND HONEST, we have enabled over 300 people to be green, enjoy themselves and learn about a new way of values based operation. For us it has been simply amazing. We couldn’t have done it without help though, The Council, Bulmers, The Courtyard, each other, our families, our friends, Howies, all of these folk have been there from the start and believed in the dream we had. For us that means more than any tip we get. So thank you to all of you.

We also have some website news- WE HAVE A WEBSITE!! CHECK IT OUT- http://www.herefordpedicabs.com

We hope you like it. Thank you again to everyone!

Will and Ben

Launch Day!

Tonight 6-8 pm at The Coutyard Theatre for the Arts!! Come along and see what all this fuss has been about!

Well who would have thought, less than five months on and we are launching Hereford Pedicabs! This week has been crazy, Hereford Journal yesterday, in the Hereford Times today, BBC Hereford and Worcester this morning, Midlands Today next week!!

Some of the press are trying to create a bit of friction between us and the regular cabbies but there's none to be found really!



It’s a very exciting time for us, we’ve had some huge support and who knows what will happen now, our guess is as good as yours. In the meantime there’s a good video article to look at on this page - http://www.thisisherefordshire.co.uk/

Thank you for your support so far and we look forward to meeting you tonight

Will and Ben

Almost there...

Hey hey hey,

Today is my birthday!

What better present than Pedicabs launching on Thursday!

Will

Some pictures of the last few weeks.

We are still feeling guilty from the lack of blogging so have put together some photos for all of you to see what we’ve been up to!

Here are the bikes on their way from Bath on a trailer, they were very excited about their future in The Shire.
The bikes arrived at their temporary home outside of Hereford, it would have been too tempting to ride them if they were in town! We rode them in from Canon Pyon under cover of darkness one night!
Once in Hereford the bikes had to go in to the printers to have the vinyls put on, the guys at Dawn till Dusk helped us out no end.
Once stickered up they could be seen by the public so we took a bike to the Courtyard to test it for space for the launch party (12th April 6pm – 8pm). I had some funny look when I rode through the door!
We recruited this Butchers bike, well it was donated by a mate of ours Rob from an earlier Blog, and Tone reconditioned it for us. Four speed dynamo hub! It’ll help for repairs and small deliveries when we start the cargo scheme.
The Bikes now have their very own licenses, I think we may be the first Pedicab company outside of London to have this and it’s thanks to the team at Licensing (Claire especially!) and the Council for being so open minded.
And here we are, last Saturday, stickered, licensed and in our uniform (t-shirts supplied by the great guys at Howies) and ready to head out on a pre launch teaser.

So team, it's really not long to go now, a week thursday! We can't believe it. Thanks for reading and supporting, the best is yet to come and we promise we’ll keep the blog going!

Will

Launch Party

Well you wait for ages and get two blogs at once!

You are all invited to our launch party at The Courtyard Hereford between 6pm and 8pm on Thursday April the 12th, it'll be a relaxed occasion where you can meet Ben and I, see the bikes, hear of our plans and generally support a great project!

We hope to see you all there and tell all of your friends!!

Will

Long Time No Blog!

Well team there are no excuses, I’ve been lazy. No blogging for a while very sorry about that. But we are back and with plenty of news so here we go to start..

I’m not sure where to really start as there is so much so here we go with a list, in no particular order: We have bikes!!, the bikes are stickered up, we have storage in place, we have a bank account, we have uniforms, we have hackney carriage licenses, we have bikes registered as hackney carriages, we have the orders to let us through town at certain times, we have a set evening route, we have well.. we have pretty much everything in place.

So here we are almost 5 months from the start and we are ready to start doing what we set out to do, that’s not bad really!

We have some future plans as well, we want to operate a cargo service during the week and inter office travel scheme. Also it was rather exciting as we had our first call about doing a wedding for someone today!

It’s finally all coming together and it has been and continues to be amazing. Next week we are doing some stuff for TV!

For the time being though I thought I’d update!

More to come now

Will