I’ve been knocked off my bike 8 times while delivering your food

Slamming into the ground with a thud, I felt confused, disorientated.

I’d been on my way to make a delivery in December 2020 and remember thinking how nice it was to see Oxford Street quieter than usual.

As a food courier, I’m used to navigating the busy roads, keeping an eye out for cars, buses, cabs and pedestrians alike. So the fact there were fewer people in general on the road that day, was a nice change of pace. 

Yet somehow, I still managed to get into an accident when I had to swerve to avoid a bus.

I then felt myself fly off my bike and land on the road with an almighty crash and a number of pedestrians came to my aid to ask if I was OK.

Even though I could immediately feel that something was wrong with my knee, I insisted I was fine and pulled myself to my feet. By the time I got up though, there was nothing in sight to explain my accident.

Unfortunately, this is not a unique tale. There’s a culture in London of drivers not respecting cycle lanes or space for cyclists in general, and that needs to change.

After spending years working in retail with no opportunities to progress, I made the switch to working for delivery apps back in 2016 as I thought it would be a way of taking some control over my own life and career.

Fast forward to today and it’s estimated that there are at least 20,000 food delivery riders in London with nearly 10% of trips on inner London’s cycle lanes being taken by these types of couriers.

Alarmingly though, there are more than 23,000 road casualties every year in London and 80% of those killed or seriously injured on London’s roads are pedestrians, cyclists, or powered two-wheeler riders like me.

In the eight years that I’ve been a food courier, I’ve been hit eight times – the most serious of which was that crash in 2020.

I ended up having to take six weeks off of work as there was no way I’d be able to keep cycling for hours on end as I’d sprained my knee.

But I also know many people who have had accidents while working, to varying degrees of severity.

Many of my friends have endured small scrapes or bruises as part of the job, but I know of at least one other person who was hit by another road user. He ended up with a broken arm and has been suffering with long-term mobility issues with his shoulder ever since.

Sadly, in November this year, research by climate charity Possible and the IWGB union – a trade union that advocates for workers’ rights and safe working conditions – found that 60% of couriers ‘always or constantly’ feel at risk or in danger on the roads when they are working.

That’s simply not good enough.

When you work in an office building, there’s health and safety guidelines and risk assessments to keep workers safe, but that doesn’t happen for couriers.

We’re expected to work long hours for low pay in a high pressure industry that sees us rush from one delivery to the next in order to make our pay worth it.

More than four years on, I still deal with knee pain from that crash simply because I couldn’t afford to be out of work for too long

For most people, getting food delivered is about convenience and ease, but most people don’t think about what we risk to get it to you. 

I’ve been doing this for the job for so long that I’ve got pretty good at navigating the busy roads, but it’s still dangerous. And if you do get into an accident it can really impact your wellbeing. 

It takes a toll on you to constantly be scared. To wonder if an accident will mean the end of my career – or even my life – all because another road user doesn’t respect my right to be there. 

My point is that the infrastructure for cycling is nowhere near good enough in London.

Where cycle lanes exist, people are abusing them by using that space to park their cars or driving too far into them so that cyclists are not able to use them safely. 

We need less traffic on the roads and for drivers to have more respect for cyclists in general. We need better and more cycle lanes to make our journeys safer so that we won’t always be competing with cars, vans, and buses while working. 

Better still, we need companies to stop the high-pressure demands of the industry that encourage unsafe practices.

There is a constant threat of being banned from the app should our ratings drop below a certain threshold, which encourages us to become reckless with our own safety. It’s why we’ll rush from pick-up to delivery and back again, because the faster you are, the better your ratings and the better you’re paid.

When companies prioritise profit over safety, then so do we. It’s not right but it is the way things are right now.

I’d also like to see those same companies, or the government, help by providing lower-emission vehicles or e-bikes that will both make our journeys safer and easier, but also greener.