Rickshaw drivers pedal against the transit tide

To get ahead, sometimes you have to go backward.

Which is why rotten, suffocating, grueling and ever-worsening Manhattan traffic has been very good for Evgueni Alexandrovitfch Smykov, better known as Alex.

He is New York’s latest traffic messiah, a little man who the billionaire mayor of this city couldn’t possibly comprehend. He drives a bicycle-powered rickshaw. In other major American cities, an oversized tricycle pulling a bench is considered a tourist whimsy, a fun way to tour the waterfront of San Francisco or the streets of old San Diego. In New York, however, it is a novelty turned survival tool.

On this smallish island of Manhattan -- less than two miles wide and 14 miles long -- congestion is horrific and has been getting worse for decades. Up to a million cars converge on the island every day. Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to finally end the 20-block SigAlert that is Midtown by turning it into a Pac Man maze of no-turn, one-way streets. For this he is willing to take on an especially nasty crowd: surly New York commuters and burly deliverymen who haul concrete for a living. The mayor is the kind of politician who now and then rides a subway but spent most of his adult life looking at the back of a chauffeur’s head. During his campaign, he promised New Yorkers he’d make them less auto dependent. His first step was to extend some traffic-reducing, post-Sept. 11 restrictions on bridges and tunnels.

Then Bloomberg learned that the average speed of a car in Manhattan was 4.8 mph, only 1.4 more than the pace of a lowly human on foot. This drove hizzoner berserk -- and lead to a slew of new rules. No lefts, no rights on several busy crosstown streets. New bans against curbside “standing” (which is New York-speak for sitting in your car doing nothing in a no-parking zone). Perhaps most daring, the mayor is talking about adding tolls on all the East River bridges to raise cash and keep cars out of the city. Previous administrations haven’t had the guts to do it.

Which is why we find Alex, on a cold fall afternoon, near the Plaza Hotel threading his rickshaw through bumper-to-bumper traffic. “This is what I can do that cars can’t,” he says triumphantly. He then offers his business card: “Alex the Pedicab Driver. Take a Ride!”

Alex says he was studying to be a translator in his native Libetsk, a steel town 300 miles southeast of Moscow, when he decided to spend a year in New York. He settled in breezy Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn and found a job pedaling, negotiating in his halting English the price of a ride with each customer and earning as much as $300 a day.

After stoking up each morning on a breakfast of Chinese take-out -- meat dumplings, pork soup, fried rice -- Alex, who weighs 120 pounds, takes a one-hour subway ride to pick up his pedicab in Midtown. The mayor wishes everyone in Brooklyn would go to work that way. For unlike L.A., which has the worst traffic of any American city but inadequate public transportation, New York has plenty of buses and subways and taxis.

The busiest times for Alex are rush hour (what a misnomer!), before the theaters open in Times Square, after they let out and always, always, when it rains. More than half of Alex’s customers are crazed businessmen who will throw a 20 at him and demand he go 20 blocks “in a big hurry.” “During rush hour I can be faster than a taxi,” he boasts as he breathlessly pedals up Sixth Avenue with two women who’ve just had a big lunch. And yes, Manhattan has hills, and the most horribly rutted streets and car doors that seem to fly open out of nowhere and ruthless city bus drivers who would mow down their mothers to stay on schedule. All of this can frighten the customers or slow Alex’s progress, he says. But to the peril of none, his boss insists.

“There have been no passengers or drivers injured in the entire seven years that pedicabs have been on New York streets,” says Arty Nichols, who started Manhattan Pedicabs in May. Before that he exclusively owned horse-drawn carriages. But you don’t have to feed a bike or clean up after it. Nichols added 10 pedicabs to the streets, bringing the total here to 60. He rents them by the day for $40 to a variety of young men, mostly Eastern Europeans, who like the independence of the job and the thrill of racing (or not) through the city. Not one to worry about political correctness, Nichols had tried to persuade one of his Asian carriage drivers to operate a pedicab. “I wanted to do up one of the bikes like real a rickshaw, with black Chinese writing on it,” Nichols says.

But the driver objected: the work was too hard. Nichols says he expects the pedicab population to swell. “It’s a reality, a way around the gridlock,” he adds.

Or a defense against a dignitary’s motorcade jamming traffic for 40 blocks in all directions. Or against the marathon that touches all five boroughs and paralyzes traffic on a sunny Sunday. Or against a spontaneous United States president like Bill Clinton who gets a hankering for a knish at the Carnegie Deli just before curtain time on Broadway. Skinny, sweet-faced Alex on a rickety seven-speed may not be the solution to gridlock, sort of like discovering the little umbrella in last night’s pina colada is not your best defense against a morning downpour.

But in a time when the mayor may raise the subway fare, when freeway advisory boards never seem to carry good news and when rapid transit is hardly that, maybe a step backward is the right way to go.