Grow slow grow strong. 4 years strong.

We're four years old today. It's crazy, looking back through the blog we've done so much.

So many great things, so much fun, big achievements, awards won, records set, boundries pushed, cultures changed, environmental benchmarks set... and the best bit.. it is still as exciting as the first day.

Thank you if you use our Pedicabs, thank you if you recycle your waste with us, thank you if you send parcels with us or the companies that use us. Thank you for listening, thank you for believing. Thank you if you are our friend.

The economic climate is tough and it has been tough growing in these times, but we've done it, bit by bit, making considered developed choices, listening to what people want and believing in our hearts. We've grown slow and we've grown strong.

Here's to the future. A fun, green and honest future.

Matt takes a detour..

'Yeah I reckon we'll get through there...'

Like teen wolf on a bike.

Saw this knocking around the internet.. super awesome

TCB BULLITT CARGO SURFING from Storts on Vimeo.

Another one for the fleet.

We picked up another trike today, second hand from a guy called Rickshaw Phil.

We've called it Big Roger.

Long live Roger and all who sail in him...

For forks sake..

So the high tech, futuristic, mono blade fork on the 8 freight bit the bullet last week.

We replaced it with a good old fashioned bit of steel. It took a bit of welding and a spot of grinding but we got there in the end..

New steed...

Saw this kicking around the internet, could do with it in Hereford.

The War on the Motorist just got a whole lot more serious. on Twitpic

Green Wedding Transport!

Since we launched almost 4 years ago we've been lucky enough to have been involved in plenty of weddings.

It isn't something we've ever pushed out, we've never been to a wedding fayre, and we've not really done any marketing other than just being out there and it is working just fine for us. We've taken brides to the church, bridesmaids and brides mothers, grooms and even had a few pets. We've shuttled people from Church to venue at village events and been a carriage for the elderly and less firm members of the party when a short walk to the after party has been too far....



We've hidden out of shot for photos

And we've been right in the centre of the action

We've been in the papers - pedicab made for two
and we've always tried to look as smart as possible


This year we think we're going to be busier than usual, we've got bookings coming out of our ears already, plus we're booked up for carnivals and festivals. We're very reasonable on cost and come in at about £30 per hour for the bike and rider. We've got two cabs we use for weddings and you can fit 3 in each. Or one huge dress and two tiny bridesmaids..

If you're interested in booking for a wedding, prom or birthday drop an email to info@herefordpedicabs.com and we'll see if we've got space for you.

Hereford Pedicabs confirmed for Telegraph Hay Festival!

We've been confirmed as a shuttle service (paid for by passenger donation) for this years Telegraph Hay Festival, it is an amazing event so we are glad to be part of it. We'll operate between the festival and Hay itself from the 26th May to the 6th of June 2011.

View Hay Festival Route in a larger map
It should be an amazing week and we can't wait to be part of it. If you're there why not say hello, in the mean time some early bird tickets are available here!

Free Trade Waste Recycling Trial for Inner City Businesses with Hereford Pedicargo

Free Trade Waste Recycling Trial for Inner City Businesses with Hereford Pedicargo

Are you an inner city business that doesn't or isn't able to recycle your waste?
Why not try our inner city recycling programme free week trial.

Since the launch of our trade waste recycling scheme in 2008 we have saved thousands of tonnes of recyclable waste from going to landfill whilst saving our customers money and returning their Co2 savings to them. Now we are welcoming new inner city customers with a free trial.

We service hundreds of businesses in Hereford but there still a few who for some reason are not recycling their waste, we want them to change and we want to make it as easy as possible whilst saving them money at the same time. We run weekly collections with no upfront costs for disposal bags and are fully registered with the environment agency.

Our recycling programme covers the recycling and shredding of paper waste, cardboard, ink cartridges and recyclable plastic films. To engage new customers we are offering a free weeks trial of our scheme. Our prices are cheaper than the current Council trade waste to landfill scheme so hopefully it should be a straight forward way for businesses to start recycling.

Contact Hereford Pedicargo by email - info@herefordpedicargo and quote 'HPC free trial' to get the ball rolling. Alternatively contact our Director Will Vaughan to have a chat about we can do for you - 07718320195

Current rates are as follows:

Recycling of waste paper - £1 per 15kg bag
(bags supplied by Hereford Pedicargo)
Shredding and recycling - £1 per 15kg bag
(bags supplied by Hereford Pedicargo)
Recycling of cardboard and newspaper - £5 per cage/pro rata –
Cage is 5ft high x4ftx4ft
Recycling of plastic films - £1 per bag
(large bag supplied by Hereford Pedicargo)
Free recycling of ink cartridges if you are using our recycling schemes

Why Do People Bike Commute? - The Atlantic

Really interesting word cloud generated by a poll, interesting to see main reasons they thought about riding to work.

365 project

So this was a personal project but I guess work popped up a fair bit

Featured Blog -

Local lad does good and all that, check him as he races downhill mountain bikes this season. Long time friend of Pedicabs Chris Griffiths will be documenting his season in this snappy looking blog

Recycling - Mad Dog Style

Big thanks to the big MD who recycled an indy car wing into a couple of these for us..

They do say motor racing technology feeds into day to day stuff..

Way back when... a secret project started..

Sooo a few months ago I might have mentioned we had a bit of a secret project running which we had been working on. It started off pretty small and then over Christmas and into the new year it turned into a monster of a job and now it’s just about settled back down.

So what was the project? Well it was a direct contract from DHL who used to have a depot in Hereford but then it got shut down and relocated to Gloucester. So in a roundabout fashion we got in touch with them about doing some work that was pretty awkward for them with the concept of running a trial before potential further opportunities presented themselves in 2011.

After a journey up to Gloucester we arrived at a big empty depot to have a chat with some folk who very shortly arranged for us to begin trying some things out.
The next day we had a tiny load of parcels delivered to us.

Loaded them into one of our bikes.

And went and delivered them

And it all went very very well. In fact it went better than well, it was great. The major impression we were left with was that our little company was the final link in a very long chain of events and a really important one because we were the link that presented goods to the customer. It took some getting our head around.

So, little by little we built on what we were doing and we were called back to DHL to see if we could assist with some of the other work over the very busy and looming Christmas period. We said yes straight away and figured we’d work the details out as we went along..

On a cold dark morning we arrived at a very busy depot and loaded our parcels into a wagon, this was the start of the big stuff for us, I noted we were the only ones wearing lycra..

We had to borrow another bike from someone because we had so much to do.
Then it got really cold.. yep.. this cold...

But it wasn't do bad because the riding warms us up, then we were so busy we had to employ a chap for the short term contract. Meet Will Version 2

Some things were naturally easier to fit in/on the bikes than others

But generally it was an amazing exercise which has seen the team working frantically over the past few months.

So what now..

Well, we’ve just come to the end of the short term cover and we’re now in the process of assessing what might happen next, how much we can handle and how we want to move it. To start with we’ve had to just like it or lump it as that’s the way it seems to go with big companies, we’ve had delayed payment and different commands from a million different people (who definitely don’t speak to each other!) but in general our feeling is that it has been a very useful project. It certainly has opened the pathway to the feasibility of last mile bike powered deliveries by major companies.

Our ability to undercut the man in van and put our own touch on the final mile has come as a surprise for DHL.

So the plan now is to form a plan for the future and to put it into place. To be honest, at this rate the future looks very very promising…

We just have to fix a few things first.

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

FROM ALL OF THE GANG HERE - HAVE A GREAT CHRISTMAS AND AN EVEN BETTER NEW YEAR

We're planning on 2011 being a big one, this month has been our busiest ever and we can't wait to see what happens next year.

5974 cups of tea.

Just over a year ago we started a trial to see if we could harness the power of the sun to generate enough power to run our business.

The first step was to have a really good think about how we did things, what we needed power for, where we got our power from and how we could make this all as efficient as possible.

Our business doesn't really need much power, we need lights and to run some simple things, charge bike lights and laptop batteries and occasionally power some bigger things. But even we could be a lot more efficient about how we do things, instead of strip lamps (80 plus watts each) we could run LEDs (10 watts) and there were lots of other things we could do.

After we'd looked at making ourselves as efficient as possible we applied for a grant. Once we got the grant we started our installation, we changed everything over to 12v power (with inverters for occasional mains stuff but mainly with 12v variable charge adaptors for electrical equipment).

By November we were ready and we plonked our solar panels on top of our offices, and then we sat back and watched something amazing happen. We watched as the sun made enough energy for us to power our things. For us the opportunity to come off the grid was great, it gave us freedom to think about our business model and how it could operate elsewhere and also an opportunity to forecast our costs exactly.

Over the last year we've been diligently recording our figures:

It shows us that there was only 1 week in the entire year where we couldn't generate enough power from just the sun. Fortunately it was windy that month too so we could build some reserves with our wind turbine.

So what does this all really mean?

Well it's a bit of a mixed bag, we've calculated exactly how much power we generated from the sun. All in all about 10372 a/h at 12v, which means we could have outputted 124464 watts for 1 hour and the nitty gritty is we generated 448070kj, in real terms this means we could have made enough boiled water to make 5974 cups of tea OR that we made the same amount of energy that you'd get if you detonated 100kgs of TNT.... BUT really its not that much.

It's REALLY not that much, we could have bought the same amount of power for less than £15. But what we've learnt is to be masters of efficiency and the way to look at this is to say we've managed to make our business so efficient if we needed to buy our power it would only cost £15 per year, so we're making our drain on the earth resources much less. Even better is we're so efficient we can generate out own power for free (ish..)

Mad Skills...

Makes you want to ride your bike.

Mayor Boris - bikes skills demo.

Bike cannon...

Gizza Job

Okey DokeyAPPLY HERE

Intro vid..

Cool little intro vid for Copenhagen Bike Film Festival which features a Bullitt just like ours

Awesome!

Actual house on fire..

Bit of bad news in Hereford today, a fire in the town centre has blocked everything off and caused a fair bit of damage, thank fully no one hurt and almost all of our deliveries got in on time (if you didn't get your delivery it's because you were shut so you'll get it tomorrow!).

Like a house on fire.

Matt's settled in now, although the project he is working on for us is remaining secret for a little longer (so far so good though and could lead to much bigger things).

It's great having more people around and also having staff who get on with each other so well. One of the hardest things in businesses seems to be finding good staff, so here's to the workforce!

Stronglight cranks..

Turns out they aren't strong or light!

Mike and Matt

So Mike finished his Pedicab training the other week and I had the pleasure of riding with him for his first night shift, here he is clicking his first customer number on to the bike:
He had an excellent night and did really well!

Also as we're talking new employees here's Matt:
Matt is currently organising a new project which we'll be revealing soon once it becomes established. He's working hard and bringing all of his expert clipboard based knowledge into the company...

Last weekend I also had the pleasure of yet another pedicab wedding so when I got the chance I snapped a photo of the bride at this point she was close to being photographed to death do I figured I'd take a cheeky snap from around the corner.

Back to the grindstone for me, the new project is keeping us super busy, we'll let you know about it soon..

Holidays, courses, saving lives, training riders and the future!

So I've been away for a bit, I went on an amazing holiday around Wales, soaking up the best that the Welsh mountian bike trail centres had to offer and saw some amazing places. If you ride a mountain bike and haven't ridden any of these trails you should really get out there. I met the guy who is responsible for a lot of them once it was really interesting -
After my stonking week away I joined Ben on a mountain biking course so in the future we can look at the potential of taking groups off on rides, it was an awesome few days and lots of fun was had in great mountain settings After a great course I arrived back at work on Wednesday morning, after unlocking everything and settling down I was greeted by a chap who looked very tired and was brushing his teeth, after some investigation I established that the chaps name was Matt and he was cycling Lands end to John O Groats. He'd slept behind the building that night after leaving his mate who dropped out a 140 miles away the previous day. Matt's bike was in bits, so I let him check the map out and fill his water bottles and fixed it up for him before sending him on his way with some gaffer tape! Wednesday continued to be a good day and then culminated in the final bit of training for our two latest riders Mike and Leon who did a fine job of carting Ben and I around Hereford and being told what they could do and where they'd fit through!Look out for them around town soon!

So lots of stuff going on with us and we've some secret news to tell you soon which is pretty exciting. Also we are working on some new projects and the feasibility of creating a method for operations like ours to operate in lots of other areas, the best bit about this has been hooking up with an old uni mate who's going to the design for us, we cant tell you too much yet but here's a hint.. For the moment that's all, but hold on for some news soon!

More bags!

Another huge delivery of paper sacks for our recycling for businesses programme. This little lot will be filled up with about 90 tonnes of paper!

Tour De France

Directors Meeting.... pedicab style

Ben and I stuck our heads together last night to have our big grown up director level accounts type meeting.

Bit serious that so we turned it into a Chide - a chat and ride...  although it turned out to be more of a Rat. Still the important things got said (most about Ben's new bike...) and we got a storming xc burn on.

All meetings should be like that..