Allison Hurley - The face of Simple Yard Care, pedaling up the hill on Scranton Road.

Bobby Breitenstein is hoping to create one new job. He and Julie Hutchison run the Phoenix Coffee Shop in Lakewood with community and sustainability in mind - recycling, using fairly traded coffees, giving away nitrogen-rich, spent coffee grounds for compost - and their customers have responded in kind. The sidewalk in front of their Detroit Avenue shop is often crowded with bicycles.

It's the bicycle, in fact, that may open up the next avenue for their business. Already they use bicycles quite a bit for banking and other errands, and they even keep one on hand for baristas to use. But Breitenstein recently started promoting the idea of bicycle delivery of Phoenix Coffee menu items to any location in Lakewood. There's a $10 minimum and $1 delivery fee. He's made only a few deliveries so far, loading up a thermal coffee urn in a bicycle trailer and pedaling to nearby shops. But he thinks this could work, both business-wise and ecologically, because bicycles are nimble, cheap to operate and don't burn gas.

Phoenix is among a handful of businesses in town building bicycles into their business plans. Not only do they think it's the environmentally responsible thing to do, but there are other advantages too, and as a couple of other entrepreneurs have found, there are cases where the bicycle is simply the best tool for the job.

DANIEL LAKE has his stout bike set up like a downhill racing machine, with beefy disc brakes designed to keep things under control while plummeting down mountain fire roads. He needs this in Tremont because he occasionally uses his bicycle and a trailer rig to move loads of dirt, mulch and shrubbery up and down Scranton Road. These days he owns a truck for moving big loads, but for three years, Lake and his partner Allison Hurley have delivered most of the services of Simple Yard Care, a landscaping and lawn maintenance company, off the back of a bicycle.

Lake, who has also worked as a machinist, loads his equipment onto a trailer meant for towing a kayak behind a bike. He replaced the boat cradle with a box-shaped metal bed, sturdy enough to haul mulch, yard waste and tools. He's got a sprayer for weeds, but it's filled with a concentration of clove oil and vinegar. Even his lawn mower runs without gas; it's one of those push mowers, with blades that spin like a rolling pin, but a high-end model typically sold to golf-course crews for putting greens.

Simple Yard Care has about 15 customers, mostly residential, all within approximately a three-mile radius in Tremont and Ohio City, which keeps them within easy biking distance. Lake says they had to turn down a job in Old Brooklyn because it was too far away. All customers get a package of services - weed control, mowing, trimming and other work - at a monthly contracted rate: He's not interested in piecemeal jobs. Lake has to keep up with the mowing every week, because, as he says, "If I get behind on the tall grass, I can't just crank the RPM up. I've got to push that much harder."

Hurley and Lake have tailored their business to the neighborhood. "The way the regular landscape guys look at it," Lake says, "if they can't do the job on their tractor mower, they don't want the contract. These are little postage-stamp yards. They have fences, and gates to get to the back yard, and you have to go around trees, and the houses are right up close together. There's a lot of things about the common practice of landscapers that just don't make sense in the urban neighborhoods."

As result, he says, Ohio City and Tremont are underserved by landscape companies. It means he can roll just a few minutes from customer to customer. He hits half a dozen before lunch.

And those densely packed neighborhoods are just where their service has appeal: Instead of the rumble of trucks, tractors and power mowers, and the urgently high whine of two-cycle trimmers, and the stink of all their exhaust, Lake brings only the whisper of a push mower and hand shears. "We don't come in like storm troopers," he says.

"When we say "no pollution,' we include no noise pollution," Hurley adds.

"ALL THIS CONSTRUCTION all over downtown - I love it," says Chris Johnson, owner of Committed Courier, a bicycle delivery company. A courier himself, Johnson also dispatches four other guys while he rides around town on his bicycle. The Blind Pig on West Sixth isn't crowded as he takes a late afternoon break there, but Johnson seems to know everyone in the place, from the bartender to the businessmen who walk by. His ambition shows in courier aphorisms like, "If you're not rolling forward or moving vertically on an elevator, you're not making money."

His two cell phones ring just about non-stop. The calls represent packages that need picking up, deliveries being confirmed. Then a call comes in that clarifies why a bicycle courier would be loving all the torn-up streets: "I'm in a light blue minivan," a phone voice crackles, and then proceeds to explain that he was sent on a mission by some other courier company to get an envelope to Playhouse Square, but got stuck at a dead-stop in traffic on East Ninth St., and the deadline for the delivery is fast approaching. Johnson takes down the van's license plate, calls one of his guys, and in just minutes, one of those guys with a rolled-up pant leg who just doesn't seem to stop rolling, no matter what the rest of traffic is doing - one of those guys is on his way to the rescue.

"We specialize in fluid movements through the inner city," Johnson says. "We can do these surgical pickups that you could never do in a car. Or we can go from one building around the corner to another - parked, locked, up and down - faster than anybody, faster than you could even park a car."

Speed is what keeps about 20 to 30 couriers working in town, for Quicksilver, Bonnie Speed or delivering carry-out lunch from the China Sea on West 6th and a few other restaurants. Johnson worked for other courier companies for a while, but realized that he had the face-to-face relationship with his customers. All he needed to start a company was a bike and a cell phone: no investment capital required. So a few years ago, he decided to take the middleman out, and he and a friend put their bikes to work for themselves. His girlfriend worked for a company that made blueprints, which frequently need to be shuffled from one office to another. More customers ensued. It's been about five years. Now there are about 70 regulars.

"Every major city in the US has bicycle couriers," Johnson says. "The cars just can't compete downtown. I love our role in the city. We're like industrial parasites, feeding off the delivery needs of the rest. I liken us to remoras."