Beirut bike messengers deliver groceries and parcels by cycling

I did the best part of my growing up in Toronto, a cold and somewhat bike-crazed city. It’s there where I met a champion bike courier from Berlin and had my first long-distance love affair when he moved back to Germany. Joern, god bless his heart, used to deliver love letters by international courier!

The city of Toronto and its people encouraged me to ride my bike  – in the thick of winter even. I shunned cars and sped by buses like I was on a zip line. Part of my enthusiasm for cycling came from the city’s renegade bike courier culture which fuelled up every morning at a coffee shop called Jet Fuel. Some 15 years later, the bike messenger movement is now moving into Lebanon.

Deghri is a new bike courier service that moves parcels around the city in a green way. Although Tel Aviv tried building its own bike courier culture and failed with Cicleta in 2008, Lebanon’s Beirut is trying to do it now and branding it as the first bike courier business in the Arab world.

It looks like the team is using traditional city bikes, and not those pimped up into an electric ride. They even have bikes with carriers on them to deliver groceries.

Sending a package by bike messenger is both a great way to employ a student or a young city cyclist, and it also helps you deliver the goods in a greenhouse gas reducing manner.

How it works: According to the good folks at Deghri, they deliver everything exclusively by bicycle, allowing them to speed past the traffic jams and get those all-important packages there on time, every time. Their basic delivery takes two hours from the moment you contact them.

“By choosing to send your packages by Deghri, you help to reduce congestion, noise and air pollution in the city. If you are looking to reduce your carbon footprint, we are the delivery service for you,” the group advertises.

The promise: 

• Fast delivery straight from A to B (within max. 2 hours)
• Carry any package up to 10kg that fits in our bags (50 litres)
• Do EVERYTHING by bicycle
• Take stuff anywhere within Greater Beirut. Note that deliveries between different municipalities incur extra charges (see map)

What they won’t deliver:

• We are not a postal service
• We don’t collect mail and distribute later the same day or the next day
• We don’t process official documents
• We don’t wait for more than 10 minutes to pick up a package. Please have it ready to be picked up.
• We don’t carry cash sums over $100. Cheques are no problem.

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Author: Karin Kloosterman

Karin Kloosterman is an award-winning journalist and publisher that founded Green Prophet to unite a prosperous Middle East. She shows through her work that positive, inspiring dialogue creates action that impacts people, business and planet. She has published in thought-leading newspapers and magazines globally, owns an IoT tech chip patent, and is part of teams that build world-changing products to make agriculture and our planet more sustainable. Reach out directly to [email protected]

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