For Food Delivery Workers, Speed, Tips and Fear on Wheels By Sean Patrick Farrell Song of the Deliveryman: Lin Dakang, a bicycle deliveryman who works for a Chinese restaurant on Manhattans Upper East Side, discusses his hectic life on the road, swerving taxis and good and bad tips. FOR a few blocks, Lin Dakang had Park Avenue to himself. There were no cars besides those idling at red lights as his bicycle whizzed uptown at nearly 20 miles per hour. It was a moment of bliss on a hectic Saturday night. But Mr. Lin had no time to savor it. A clear plastic takeout bag hung from his handlebars: a steaming order of chicken in garlic sauce and vegetable lo mein that would cool quickly in the evening air. Seconds counted, and Mr. Lin glided through intersections against the light, pausing briefly to check the traffic before pushing on the pedals and engaging the small but powerful electric engine in his rear hub. This first delivery of the dinner shift was more than a mile from the restaurant. Arriving, he surged off the bicycle, lashing it to a nearby pole with a heavy chain. A doorman stepped from the gleaming entrance of a prewar building on Park Avenue and pointed him to a side alley. Mr. Lin hurried down a ramp, past trash bags and through a door into the basement. There, a building worker waited to take him up in a manually operated freight elevator. He exchanged few words with the customer, who handed over $15.50 and a $2 tip. For two and a half miles of travel, round trip. On a brisk winter night. "So-so," Mr. Lin, 39, said of the amount before speeding off to the next delivery. Each day, and especially at night, thousands of deliverymen like Mr. Lin clatter over potholes in streets and crisscross broad delivery zones in a dash for tips. Ubiquitous but largely anonymous, they race through their rounds and deposit food with barely a word to their customers. Their world draws little notice from most New Yorkers, except those who view delivery bicycles as an urban menace. Complaints by residents in some neighborhoods - particularly the Upper East Side, where Mr. Lin works - have prompted ticketing by the police and calls to punish restaurants for their sidewalk-riding, red-light-running employees. Electric bicycles, officially banned but increasingly favored by many who deliver food, have only stoked the fire, as they have extended restaurant delivery zones and put an even greater premium on speed. And the elements of the job are a constant: nasty weather, dangerous encounters with cars and long hours for wages and tips that can fall well below the minimum wage. Deliverymen and women have few defenders or advocates. They lack the cultural aura that once gave bad behavior by bicycle messengers an outlaw appeal. Nobody romanticizes deliverymen - and they are almost all male - as urban cowboys. "It's one of those things that New Yorkers just look away from," said Kevin Bolger, 40, a former owner of a messenger company who has worked as a food deliveryman. Delivery workers are like dishwashers on wheels. MR. LIN'S day began hours earlier in a small apartment above a laundromat in the Chinese enclave of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, that he shared with his older sister and three other people, all of whom work in restaurants. He was awake at 8:40 a.m., and his routine was simple: brush teeth, take 10 minutes to dress, compose himself and pray before heading downstairs to buy breakfast: one roll, one milk tea, $2. It was the only money he would spend on food all day. An hour-and-a-half journey by subway and foot took him to the Upper East Side, where he has worked at a small Chinese takeout place, Six Happiness, for more than a year, the longest he has been in one job since he arrived in this country from Fujian Province in China in 2009. He had a lot on his mind that Saturday: his wife back home; his work as a church volunteer; and, most of all, an asylum hearing in a Manhattan court in a few days that would probably alter the course of his life. But on the bike, he said, those worries faded completely in favor of a more primal concern. "I just pray to God that nothing happens to me," he said in Mandarin Chinese. You have to understand how horrible the taxis are. In America, they can stop wherever they want! Jeffrey E. Singer contributed reporting.