There might be limited options for career advancement, but bike courier Chris Baker still reckons he has one of the world’s best jobs. 

Chris Baker was once told he had “the best dead-end job in the world – there’s nowhere you can go from here, unless you buy the company.” Well, he did buy into the company, Nocar Cargo in Wellington, and if he’s going nowhere, he’s at least going on a bike. 

18 years ago, Baker was living in Melbourne, working at a museum, and he was desperate to be a bike courier. “I’ve always been into bikes and I basically just wanted to figure out how to ride bikes all day.” He knew a few riders, and he tried to follow their advice: call the courier companies, over and over again, hoping someone would be sick or injured and need a hand. 

Eventually, he got his break. “One of the couriers sent me a message saying there was an opening with this one guy, he rips you off a bit though – and he accidentally sent it to his boss as well as me,” Baker says, laughing. His mate didn’t lose his job, and Baker got one. That initial company might have been a little dodgy – “it was sort of set up to evade taxes, there was some weird stuff going on” – but when he moved back to Aotearoa 12 years later, he knew he still wanted to spend all day with bikes. 

Baker briefly dallied with fixing them as a mechanic and teaching kids to ride through a council programme, working at Nocar Cargo once or twice a week. “But then in summer I realised I just needed to be outside again,” he says, so he started riding full time for Nocar, and he hasn’t looked back since. 

Today we’re talking in Pukeahu, Wellington’s War Memorial Park, our conversation punctuated by the sound of skateboard wheels on concrete. It’s Baker’s lunch break: before long, the radio on his shoulder will crackle again, and he’ll be off to the next job.  

The city feels different as a bike courier: you’re hyper-attuned to changes, the sound of traffic. With different clients and deliveries each day, there’s always a reason to go down a side street you haven’t noticed before. “It’s like – there’s an alleyway there, there’s a shortcut there, that alleyway is closed so I’ll have to go another way,” he says. “I basically have the city in my head.” 

Bike couriers have to be adaptable. “I might be in the north end of the city, with eight or so jobs to do, then I get an alert that someone’s made an order for our 15-minute service across town.” Turn, pedal, park, walk into the building to find the next task. 

When you’re biking as many as 70 kilometres a day, an electric cargo bike helps – much easier than Baker’s first unpowered cycles nearly two decades ago. “In Wellington with the wind and the hills, going into a strong northerly is pretty tiring even with the battery,” he says. And when it’s raining, Baker has to be equipped too, with head-to-toe “really good wet weather gear.” 

The most important of the gear is, of course, the bike itself. Baker’s bike looks a little unwieldy to me, as I’m used to zipping around on a light aluminium commuter vehicle: his is long and blue, with a flat board and attached tarpaulin on the front, so he can keep an eye on his cargo. The battery is attached to his frame; if its power runs out, he can easily switch it out for another at the courier company’s warehouse. If he gets a flat tire, well “you just have to stop and fix it” – but even these aren’t common, especially when a rider might use a lull during the day to do some maintenance. 

Cargo can be delicate. Florists frequently choose the express service, and the flowers are vulnerable to wind and rain, so have to be taken to their destination as fast as possible. “If anything, we have to carry more flowers in bad weather, because people don’t want to go to the florist if it’s raining,” Baker says. Much of the rest of the cargo is bulkier and more boring: piles of printing, usually destined for government departments. 

Somewhat ironically, one of the most common things Baker has to carry is car parts: mechanics might find a part that needs replacing while the car is in the hoist, and will want a replacement as soon as possible. “They’ll call a distributor of parts and need it straight away, so they send us,” he says, snapping his fingers to demonstrate the immediacy. 

Some customers might book a bike delivery because they like the idea that it’s sustainable, no idling engines contributing to deadly air pollution; others because they appreciate that Nocar is a living wage employer, giving its riders status as employees rather than contractors. But for most customers, they simply appreciate that bikes are more efficient at getting from A to B in a city. “Cargo bikes, especially electric cargo bikes are just faster,” Baker says. “We can go exactly to where we need, pop onto the footpath, without worrying about parking or anything like that.” Bikes aren’t delayed by traffic, and they’re slender enough to weave past idling cars: Baker thinks there is lots more potential for bikes to do “last mile delivery” in New Zealand. “It eases congestion – I’d love to see the big courier companies invest in that.” 

Even though he cycles all day for work, just like he dreamed of two decades ago, Baker still loves bikes enough that he’ll go riding in his time off. He has bikepacked the Tour Aotearoa route from Cape Reinga to Bluff, and the Sound to Sound. He goes mountain biking on his weekends, too. “If a hobby is something you do for pleasure that isn’t your job, this blurs the lines,” he says, grinning. “Despite how much time I spend riding, I’m still a bike nerd.”