The City Council will consider its ban on the pedaled cabs, but lincensing them would include some restrictions.

01:00 AM EDT on Monday, April 10, 2006

BY RICHARD SALIT
Journal Staff Writer

NEWPORT -- They're like the rickshaws you picture rolling down the hurly-burly streets and rural dirt roads of Asia, except that instead of being pulled by a quick-footed peasant, they're pedal powered.

From Boston to Santa Barbara, New York to New Orleans, pedicabs are becoming a hip, environmentally friendly way to get around resurgent American cities. But in this summer resort, where horse-drawn carriages are allowed to carry tourists around town, three-wheeled rickshaws have had the air taken out of their tires.

The City Council recently refused to issue licenses to two pedicab businesses, citing concerns raised by public safety officials. Only Councilwoman Jeanne-Marie Napolitano supported granting the licenses.

"I didn't expect the vote to go that way. I was floored," said Napolitano, adding that pedicabs operated in Newport for a while without any problems. "They were kind of cute. They didn't seem to obstruct anything."

The council's decision, three weeks ago, had Napolitano and quite a few people in the community scratching their heads. It became a hot issue on the letters-to-the-editor pages of local newspapers.

"The council has sometimes considered items like this as if they just arrived from Mars, with no policy or reason," Martin Douglas wrote to Newport This Week.

The council is apparently willing to rethink its decision. This week, it will consider allowing pedicabs with restrictions. The primary one would bar pedicabs from two of downtown's most vital and traveled streets -- America's Cup Avenue, which passes by Newport's most popular wharves, and Memorial Boulevard, which runs between downtown and such famous attractions as Cliff Walk, Easton's Beach and noble Bellevue Avenue.

"I don't think I'd be able to operate without America's Cup," says Gregory Angel, who ran Newport-based Pangea Pedicabs until duty called the National Guardsman to Iraq last summer. "That's a pretty major road for me."

ANGEL, 39, hopped aboard the pedicab fad early, long before the passenger-toting bicycles were featured in prime-time TV episodes of The Apprentice and The Biggest Loser and before one appeared on the cover of Fodor's 2006 guide to New York City.

It was while Angel was training in San Diego, a Mecca for triathletes like himself, that he saw pedicabs in action. He was immediately taken with their fun and healthy vibe and saw an opportunity to cater to tourists and others back home.

"I thought this would be great in the summertime in downtown Newport," he says.

So in 1999, he flew to Oregon, bought four pedicabs at a factory for about $6,000 each and trucked them back home.

At that time, the City Council was reluctant to approve the pedicabs. So Angel brought one to the foot of the grand granite steps of City Hall for the members to see before a meeting one night. The council wound up approving licenses, but restricted Pangea to certain streets. Over the years, the company operated without incident and the council approved Angel's requests to add more streets.

Last year, Angel, a sergeant first class in the Rhode Island National Guard, had to take Pangea off the road for the entire season when he was dispatched to Iraq with his Special Forces unit.

When he returned this past winter, the pedicab landscape was shifting. Pedicabs had arrived in Boston and one of the companies there was looking to expand into Newport. Boston Pedicab had applied for a license to operate four to five of the vehicles here.

It was the first time the current council, with a majority of first-term members, had been introduced to pedicabs. Instead of simply issuing licenses as the previous councils had done, it directed the city solicitor to draft an ordinance regulating pedicabs. Council members told Boston Pedicab that it wouldn't act on its license application until the ordinance was adopted.

A couple of months later, the council passed a seven-page ordinance requiring, among other things, that operators hold licenses to drive cars and pedicab owners carry appropriate insurance. The next step was the vote on the licenses.

Angel was at that meeting and expected a fairly routine vote. Instead, the council was advised that the Interdepartmental Traffic Commission -- which includes police, fire and other city department representatives -- was opposed to pedicabs. The commission warned that pedicabs might cause traffic problems and obstruct emergency vehicles.

Napolitano said she appreciated the input of the commission but deemed the concerns to be "vague." She thought that the past experience with Pangea had proven the safety of pedicabs.

"They didn't create a problem," she said. "I never heard boo."

Even a retired Newport traffic sergeant, who was still working when the pedicabs made their debut in Newport, was stymied by the city's safety fears.

"I was skeptical initially, but pleasantly surprised at how easily they maneuver in traffic and actually did not impede traffic any more -- actually, much less -- than the horse and carriages," Rick Lombardi wrote to a local paper.

ONE RECENT AFTERNOON, Angel takes one of his four pedicabs out of his garage on Broadway. The front looks like an ordinary bike, made of steel with hand brakes and shifters for 12 gears (Angel more than doubled the standard number of gears because of the streets that climb steeply up to Bellevue Avenue and into the Historic Hill section). The rear, however, looks like a miniature carriage, with a pair of wheels supporting a bench seat for as many as three people, a canopy to keep out the wind, sun and rain, and space on the rear of the cab to display advertisements.

Angel pedals off down the street and then demonstrates how quickly the bike turns -- actually more quickly and more nimbly than a regular bike because of a dual-rear axle that allows the wheels to spin independently of one another.

"You can turn on a dime," he says, noting that a pedicab is much smaller than a car or truck in terms of the space it takes up, but can keep up with motor vehicles on Newport's congested summer streets.

Angel says he understands the concerns about emergency vehicles because he's been a paramedic for many years, most recently for the South Kingstown Fire Department. Pedicabs do not pose a risk, he says, because "you can easily pull off the road."

The only accident in the years his drivers took to the streets of Newport -- working primarily for tips -- was when a truck sideswiped one of the pedicabs.

"You can 'what if' this to death," he says. "You can always say something is going to happen."

As for public rallying to his defense partly because his pedicab business was shot down upon his return from Iraq, he says, "whether I was in Iraq or not was irrelevant."

COUNCILMAN STEPHEN COYNE says that after the pedicab vote, he and several council members asked City Manager Edward F. Lavallee to review the issue.

"I won't say there's been a real change in thinking," says Coyne, "but we asked, what are the real major safety concerns? Is it a concern on every street?"

Lavallee came back with a set of conditions he reviewed with police and fire officials. These included the America's Cup Avenue and Memorial Boulevard prohibition as well as a midnight curfew and a limit of 12 pedicab licenses. Also, the pedicabs must obey the rules of the road.

Coyne expects to move to reconsider the licenses for Pangea and Boston Pedicab when the council meets at 7 p.m. Wednesday at City Hall.

"This is something the council thinks is viable," he said. "The information we got last time . . . was a little last-minute. I don't think we had the time to make these changes or talk about making these changes. I don't think the council is against pedicabs per se."

Coyne said passenger safety must also be taken into account, especially because the pedicabs are much smaller and less rugged than carriages pulled by horses.

Angel thinks his business should have been "grandfathered" because of the years it operated in the past and suggests that the city "put me under a microscope" to see how the business operates.

He pedals the pedicab back into the garage, quickly and deftly parking it in a tight space between two others. Whether any of the vehicles will come out of the garage this summer could be decided Wednesday night.

rsalit@projo.com / (401) 277-7467