Walking around downtown Toronto after an early dinner tonight, something odd caught my eye. It seemed that most people riding bicycles around me were not, in fact, cyclists. At least around dinnertime, the vast majority of people riding bikes here are food delivery workers. And if you watch closely, almost none of them are actually cycling; instead, they solely rely on the electrical motors of their e-bikes. To the trained eye of a former bike messenger¹, this looks very odd.

The fact that most food delivery workers on bikes do not cycle is clearly legible when looking at the chains of their bikes: Many of them have chains so rusty that they are stuck in odd angles, others have chains permanently stuck between the frame and the cogs or zip-tied to their chain stays, and a surprising amount of them simply lack chains at all.