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Jason Ramage is a bike courier for Bike Depot and CBD Courier. The company's couriers serve the Louisville area year-round.

In New York and San Francisco, they are a tattooed and grizzled lot. They ride fast, weaving between cars hopelessly stalled in midtown gridlock. They consider their ranks sacred, like territorial surfers patrolling their hometown break. But for all the renegade cool and punk rock sensibility of bike couriers, their mission remains a simple one: deliver packages as fast as hell.

"I've seen `Quicksilver,'" local courier Russ Owens said of the 1986 Kevin Bacon flick, perhaps the only one about bike couriers. "I kind of consider myself a little bit of an edgier-type person, so it's kind of a natural fit for me."

Bike couriers first made it to Louisville in 2003 when Cindy Baker and Jackie Green opened Bike Depot on West Market Street. Besides a bike shop and café, the depot focuses mainly on its courier services, shuffling paperwork and small packages among Louisville law firms, medical offices, advertising agencies, photography studios, banks and pharmacies.

The seven or so couriers flip on their cell phones each morning at 8 and wait for Green to call them with their assignments. On busy days, riders can rack up as much as 50 miles in the saddle, ferrying prescriptions from hospitals and pharmacies to homebound seniors or carting a law firm's mail to the post office.

Deliveries can take the riders as far east as the Watterson Expressway, as far west as 22nd Street and all the way to Dixie Highway.

In the earliest days of the service, riders would pedal all the way out to the Gene Snyder Freeway. Safety concerns, however, caused the couriers to narrow their range of service.

"I don't get hassled unless I'm outside of the downtown area, like far down Bardstown Road or on the Dixie," said Joe Barlund, a courier who's been with Bike Depot almost since its inception.

Owens, who moved to Louisville from Pittsburgh about six years ago without a car and hasn't had one since, has only been dinged twice since taking the job six months ago.

"I just got some scrapes and bumps and bike damage," said Owens, 30. "Mostly my nerves were shaken."

Green, who had no bike courier service experience before starting CBD Courier, believes there is a nobler purpose to all this than meets the eye.

Getting a 10-ounce item 20 blocks across town doesn't take a half-ton vehicle, Green said, and a bike traveling down the center of the road, he insists, is a natural impediment to keep traffic from racing along at dangerous speeds.

"We've got some serious air quality issues here," Green said. "This gives some companies an opportunity to begin addressing air-quality and fuel-consumption issues."

Between deliveries, riders often hang at coffee shops or Bike Depot waiting for another call to come in. It's an exciting but often punishing job, said Owens, who welcomes the heat and humidity of August over the cold and rain of January.

"The rain and cold makes for a pretty miserable day," he said. "You're sopping wet all day, but we've never had to call a snow day. We ride through pretty much anything."