An Austin pedicab company that stayed small on purpose.

Pedicab Adventures has been working Austin for years — the National Geographic fleet went out in 2015. We run out of a shop on East Fourth Street — the carriages are fiberglass, the bikes are motorized, and most nights you'll find them somewhere between Rainey Street and the west end of Sixth.

The fleet splits two ways: 25 bikes carrying people — tours, weddings, charters, the Saturday night crowd — and a campaign capacity of up to 100 when a brand needs the whole city covered.

We've been at this a long time. In March 2015 we wrapped 24 pedicabs for National Geographic and ran them through the entire length of SXSW, promoting Life Below Zero and an activation on East 2nd Street. It's still one of the best campaigns we've done, and it set the pattern for how we work: pick the event, saturate it, and let the fleet do the job a static sign can't.

Since then we've carried Miller Lite through Austin City Limits, 3M through downtown at night, Xero through a barricaded SXSW, and SXSW Sydney's own scan-to-win campaign across a wrapped fleet. In between we've driven a lot of couples away from their weddings and shown a lot of visitors the murals they'd otherwise have missed.

Why the fleet is set up this way

We keep the fleet uniform and we look after it ourselves, which is why a campaign gets matching carriages rather than whatever happens to be running that week. The bikes are motorized, which matters for the ordinary reasons: longer tours, a bigger campaign footprint, and drivers who aren't finished by midnight.

Why we do advertising and rides

Some pedicab companies are transport companies that occasionally sell a panel ad. Others are ad companies that treat the passenger as a prop. We think the two make each other better: an ad on a cab that's genuinely busy carrying people gets seen in more places, and a driver who has campaign work booked isn't at the mercy of whether it rains on a Saturday.

What we're not

We're not a national chain and there's no dispatch call center. Ring the number on this site and you get somebody who knows where every bike is tonight. For a lot of clients that's the whole reason they call us instead of somebody bigger — and if a job genuinely isn't right for us, we'll say so rather than take the booking.