You are reading a single comment by @two-five and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
@two-five
@Kips:
Don't know much about living costs in London. Here in Berlin, you need something about 400-450 Euro for a small, but reasonable apartment including gas/water/electricity. Medical insurance is about 200-250 Euro, 20-50 Euro for phone, internet etc. So you have base living costs of 620-750 Euro, remaining money to spend for "real" living. This is ok, but not too much.
How to get started? Well... there are something about 14000 roads in Berlin, even experienced couriers don't know all of them. There are several hundred ones that recently appear either as pickup or destination addresses, and probably 1000 more which you'll hear from time to time on the radio. A good A-Z helps. At the larger courier companies, orders are dispatched via two-way radio with a combined freestanding/blockreading system. As a courier, you may offer yourself as standing free in one district. That means the next (or n-th) order will be assigned to you. Pickups that start in a district where nobody is standing free are just read and you can call on them. Newbies mostly use the freestanding principle and seldomly call on tours. Which means that they do one job after another and don't combine. So they earn less.
I don't know if there are collegues out there using GPS, but I doubt. It doesn't make much sense for a cyclist. Those GPS-based navigation systems are optimized for motorized traffic and don't know about the shortcuts that make courier life efficient.