When we talk about going from A-to-B in New Orleans, or complain about the state of the streets, our default assumption is, we’re driving a car. If you live here, you have a car parked outside your house. If you’re a tourist, you rent a car at the airport – and take your life in your hands like the rest of us driving around New Orleans.
That’s how it’s been for years. Until recently. Today, there’s a movement away from driving.
It’s not a mass movement. It’s not like there are hundreds of thousands of people abandoning their cars, but there are a significant number of New Orleanians riding bicycles. Especially e-bikes.
Fewer tourists are renting cars. Principally because of ride-sharing companies, Uber and Lyft. And in the French Quarter, tourists are hopping into pedicabs.
For the most part, the people piloting those pedicabs are independent operators. Like Uber and Lyft drivers, they’re gig workers who work for one of three New Orleans pedicab companies.
Each company has 15 pedicabs. One of the company’s pedicabs are yellow, another one has red pedicabs, and a company called Need A Ride NOLA has white pedicabs.
A person who goes by a one-word name, Tree, has been piloting Need A Ride NOLA pedicabs since 2016.
Need A Ride NOLA pedicab driver Tree, Out to Lunch at Columns on St Charles Avenue in Uptown New Orleans
We first met Tree on Out to Lunch in 2013. At that time were producing this show at Commander’s Palace and Tree had a Garden District tour guide business called Racontours that ended with a 5 course lunch at Commander’s. And a lot of 25c martinis.
My other lunch guest, Charlie Thomas, owns the Mid-City bike shop, Bayou Bicycles. But that’s not his day job. He’s actually a lawyer. A personal injury attorney. Specializing in cases involving bikes and cyclists.
Charlie Thomas, Bike Law attorney at Huber Thomas law firm & Owner of Bayou Bikes – “We are trying to put ourselves out of business with better enforcement of the laws and better driving.”
Charlie practices bicycle-related law across three states: Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. He’s a member of a national network of bicycle lawyers, called the Bike Law network. And here in New Orleans, Charlie’s a partner in the Huber Thomas law firm where he oversees a team of attorneys and paralegals, five of whom work consistently on bike-related cases.
Technical Producer Eric Murrell, Peter Ricchiuti, Out to Lunch at Columns on St Charles Avenue in Uptown New Orleans
When you look back at old photos from years ago, it can be amazing to note that, what at the time was just a regular haircut, shirt and pair of pants, now looks so identifiable as belonging to a different era.
Today, bikes are part of our zeitgeist. Or, as zeitgeist-y language would have it, bikes are having a moment. What we don’t know is – is it more than a moment? Is it a trend? 20 years from now, will millions more Americans be riding bicycles and e-bikes? Or will they look at photos from this era and marvel at how 2020’s we looked back then with our bikes?
Whichever way the future turns out, for right now, Charlie and Tree are definitely pedaling us toward it.
Technical Producer Eric Murrell, Peter Ricchiuti, Charlie Thomas, Tree, Out to Lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans
Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans.
Bike Law attorney Charlie Thomas and pedicab rider Tree hit the road after Out to Lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans
