Cascadian Courier Collective Pedals Through Changes in Delivery Business – BikePortland

Where are all the commuter cyclists in Portland?

That’s a question I asked myself when I returned from a recent trip to New York and several European cities where cyclists carried large bags of food on their backs or on bike racks. I didn’t think much of it before, but after my trip, I was surprised by Portland’s lack of cyclists. Catering has skyrocketed in popularity during the pandemic, and it’s not going away anytime soon. So how can we ensure that more of these trips are made by bike?

Portland is it. Home to a number of companies that specialize in delivering goods by bike, couriers B-Line Urban Delivery (who we recently featured on the BikePortland Podcast), food delivery service provider Portland Pedal Power and food delivery company Cascadian Courier Collective PDX (CCC PDX). CCC PDX is a company that works as closely as I’ve seen bike delivery in other cities, so I decided to ask them for an update on the state of local bike delivery.

“There are great local restaurant owners who are frustrated with dealing with apps and see the value in working with a local company.”

– Ponce Christi, founder of CCC PDX

Cascadian Courier Collection (other CCC)

CCC PDX started in Eugene over a decade ago and began operations in Portland in 2017. But the company grew exponentially during the pandemic, as demand for home delivery increased and new demand for bicycle delivery emerged. According to owner Ponce Christi, customers and business owners using delivery apps like Uber Eats and Grubhub have found the limitations of these services to be high fees for consumers and restaurants.

Because the fees are out of control, the city of Portland put a temporary cap on what third-party apps can charge restaurants — 10% of the total order price — but that rule wasn’t always followed. In January, the Portland City Council approved a 15% fixed fee for food delivery orders. But CCC PDX can do you one better: Christie says they’ve always had a 10% fee and have no plans to raise it.

“Suddenly everyone was trying delivery apps for the first time and finding out how terrible it was,” Christie told BikePortland in a phone call earlier this week. “I think our business is up something like 1000%, which is obviously crazy because we’re a small business. It’s been hard to adjust.”

But they hired dozens of new couriers and built relationships with restaurants that loved the local feel, low fees and eco-friendly approach to food delivery.

“There are so many great local restaurant owners who are frustrated with dealing with apps and see the value of working with a local company,” Christie said. Our customers are generally loyal. Once they find out about us, they seem really pissed off at the idea and come back and try again.

“If I’m delivering by car, all the money I make goes back into the car.”

– Zach, CCC Employee

Sent

Yesterday afternoon I rode through Northeast Portland with Zak, who has been delivering bikes for six months at CCC PDX. His job was to deliver packages to people’s homes from a food kit company called Fam Forward, and Zach had upgraded the smaller carriers from a standard road bike to one of his CCC Bullet cargo bikes to accommodate everything. The bike didn’t have electric assist, but Zach maneuvered it wonderfully through the busy streets of the Hollywood neighborhood and then up Alameda Ridge, unloading packages as we went.

For many of the same reasons, a bicycle is an excellent tool for daily transportation, and it is also a very practical means of transportation. You can avoid the traffic and time-consuming hassle of searching for a parking space outside of restaurants and delivery houses. Cycling all day is also fun: you get a lot of exercise and you can connect with your community. But I think a more compelling reason to deliver by bike than by car is to keep more of the money you earn when you don’t have to pay for gas or car maintenance.

“It’s been good not paying attention to gas prices for the last six months,” Zach told me. “If I’m delivering by car, all the money I make goes back into the car.”

Riding with Zac was fun, although I have to admit I wasn’t envious of the space he had to carry around, especially on a non-electric bike. But Zach was in good spirits the whole time.

“I didn’t have many jobs that I liked,” Zach said. “But I really like doing it.”

I asked Patrick Riley, who drives for DoorDash, about the service’s timing, and he had a very different take.

“It’s not a fun job,” says Patrick. “A lot of it is trying to figure out where to stop and where to go and where to stop.”

“I think it’s wrong to be able to order food whenever you want with the click of a button, because the app says it’s convenient.”

The price of convenience

One of the core beliefs in CCC’s business philosophy is that people don’t always need everything right away. But that’s a difficult business model in the midst of Amazon Prime’s same-day deliveries and Uber Eats’ 20-minute wait times. People are not used to waiting anymore. But Christie points out that when you deliver within a mile or two, biking can often be faster than taking a car.

“I think the argument that many people make against sending bicycles will take a long time. But most of the time it takes about the same amount of time to transport as it does in a car.

At CCC, Christie also wants to encourage people to look more closely at options closer to home for bike delivery.

“I think it’s a mistake to be able to order food whenever you want with the click of a button because the app is convenient,” Christie said. “If you live in Portland, there are probably 20 other restaurants that you can patronize within miles of you. That’s one of the great things about it.

This is one of the reasons CCC hasn’t stuck with the electric bike revolution: they don’t want to set the bar too high for speed. But in cities like New York, the bike-sharing industry is booming largely because of electric bikes (although this sparked controversy after several cheap e-bike batteries caught fire while charging in apartments). If more people in Portland can get e-bikes, I think it will open up a career path for less enthusiastic people to ride a heavy cargo bike up Portland’s hills. Maybe if an e-bike rebate bill is passed in Oregon, we’ll enter a new era of bike couriers?

I’d love to see a revitalized bike delivery culture in Portland. That means fewer cars on the road (and fewer Uber Eats drivers parking in bike lanes, which I see regularly), and connecting with local restaurants is a great way to revitalize Portland’s bike scene.

To encourage this, I think the most important step is to simply make cycling around town easier for any purpose – the places in the world where bicycle provision works best are also the places where cycling is ubiquitous. And as the Portland Bureau of Transportation works on its 2040 freight plan, you might want to consider ways to encourage last-mile and bike-based food delivery.

For now, you can support the movement by ordering directly through the CCC website from 16 local locations.