by Bailey White
Staff Writer
The quick-moving, adventure-loving bike messengers that populate the streets of New York City and San Francisco will soon be rolling on downtown streets.
Speciality Freight Services, a courier company located on Hendricks Avenue, will add bike messengers to its service the first week of April, a date which coincides with the company’s sixth anniversary.
“We thought it would be a good time to get it going,” said SFS owner Lisa Ehrie. “I think Jacksonville is ready for this.”
Currently, the company offers courier service to Jacksonville and surrounding areas via car, truck or van and can travel statewide or further if needed. Combining the two services, they say, will greatly increase the speed of operations.
“If a delivery needs to be made in Baymeadows, for instance,” said Ehrie, “the messenger will meet one of our car couriers who will take it on.”
“This will improve our existing service tenfold,” said Bryce Morrison, operations manager for SFS.
Both Ehrie and Morrison believe law firms will be some of their biggest clients for the bike messenger service and have been gaining support from members of the legal community for whom they already provide service.
“Our idea is to get our messengers into the buildings to pick up the stuff within 10-15 minutes of a phone call,” said Ehrie. “That’s unprecedented.”
Bike couriers won’t have to deal with the lack of parking at the courthouse and, Ehrie and Morrison predict, will be able to reach the farthest downtown destinations and even get into Riverside within 10 minutes.
Ehrie has been entertaining the idea of bike messenger service in Jacksonville for several months now. On a trip to New York last August, she researched the way the programs are run and developed her own ideas about what makes a good bike messenger.
“The bike messengers there take their jobs seriously and companies there are very dependent on them” she said. “They add a lot of energy and atmosphere to the city and things are always moving.”
To maintain that high level of energy and professionalism, Ehrie and Morrison say they’ll be extremely selective in the hiring process.
“We’re being extremely choosy,” said Ehrie. “We want to make sure we find the cream of the crop and people who are in excellent physical shape and enthusiastic.”
Training will be intense. The Jacksonville bike messengers will be getting lessons from their New York counterparts.
“We’ll bring them down here or we might take some of our bike messengers up there,” said Ehrie.
The messengers will be equipped with the latest technology, allowing up to the minute communication between the messengers, the SFS home office and its clients.
“Each messenger will be equipped with a two-way radio and a tracking device,” said Morrison. “Our clients will be able to track their deliveries on our website, in real time. Our commitment to technology is one of the things that will allow us to operate successfully.”
The addition of the bike messengers will add five or six people to its current staff of 25, something the company planned for when it moved from its former headquarters on Art Museum Drive to Hendricks Avenue.
“We’re ready for growth,” said Ehrie. “We moved into the space in July knowing that we’d be able to grow there.”