The study draws on twenty-two semi-structured interviews conducted in Toronto in 2024 with app-based couriers, volunteers for a delivery non-profit, and cooperative bike messengers, combined with a scoping review of international studies on delivery labour. Rather than treating these interviews as conventional survey evidence, the authors distil them into ethnographic vignettes, literary snapshots that carry the emotional texture of riders’ experiences into theoretical analysis. Through these vignettes, the paper expands an existing analytical framework on (in)visibility in platform-mediated work, originally developed by Gruszka and Böhm, which distinguishes three intersecting dimensions: perceptible, institutional, and individual (in)visibility.

Perceptible (in)visibility concerns whether workers are actually seen while working. Institutional (in)visibility addresses the formalisation and regulation of work, including the notorious question of whether platforms are employers at all. Individual (in)visibility centres on the digital infrastructures of profiles, ratings, and algorithmic management that render workers (in)visible online. For web-based labour such as content moderation or data annotation on crowdsourcing platforms, invisibility has seemed almost definitional: workers are geographically untethered, dispersed around the world, and reduced to number-based profile names, creating what scholars describe as an illusion of bodilessness. Domestic and care workers on platforms are hidden in private homes, echoing the original feminist conceptualisation of invisible work as reproductive labour performed behind closed doors.

Delivery riders, by contrast, would appear to escape these dynamics altogether. Their platform-branded clothing and electric bicycles make them impossible to miss, and their access to physical meeting spots has been credited with building worker solidarity and strengthening collective bargaining. But Bruck and Gruszka contend that characterising delivery work as innately visible because it is physically perceptible ignores how labour performed in public space can be devalued through spatial dynamics. Following Emma Hatton’s influential notion of sociospatial mechanisms of invisibility, invisible work may take place in the public sphere yet remain economically devalued because it occurs in non-traditional worksites. Public space, the authors insist, must be theorised as precisely such a non-traditional worksite, not as a neutral backdrop but as a social product that can reproduce devaluation and cultural othering.

The first facet of the paradox concerns cultural and institutional underrepresentation within cycling and transportation regimes. Mobility scholarship has long documented how mainstream urban bicycle culture in North America has been dominated by white middle-class riders, while delivery riders, who are disproportionately recent immigrants and racial minorities, are cast as invisible riders in cycling debates. In New York City, an estimated 56,168 delivery workers used e-bikes for work in 2021, comparable to the number of residents recorded as bicycle commuters, yet past transportation plans failed to recognise delivery riders as a distinct user group, leaving their infrastructure and safety needs unaddressed. Municipal cycling counts have undercounted commercial cyclists, and riders navigate car-dominated streets with an ambiguous status as e-bike users, no safety training, and no guaranteed protection from traffic hazards.

This marginalisation cuts both ways. Riders are underrepresented in planning and advocacy, yet hypervisible in mediatised narratives that frame them as reckless and rule-breaking, a dichotomy first documented among Chinese delivery cyclists in New York City. Their perceptible presence exposes them to recurring judgement, discrimination, and policing, amplified by media coverage that casts them as disruptors of social order. Even within cycling communities, riders on e-bikes doing gig work are treated as a different category that does not count. The authors note that although delivery riders have led some of the most visible platform labour protests, these efforts have primarily yielded union representation and negotiating power over labour conditions, with little impact on infrastructural and traffic-related challenges. Institutional visibility in one policy arena has not extended to others.

The second facet is gendered segmentation. Judith, an app-based courier and union organiser interviewed for the study, describes a gendered and racialised experience of delivery work: name-calling, physical targeting, riders intentionally hit by cars, and a client whose repeated sexual harassment took years and complaints from dozens of mostly female riders before the platform banned him. International studies mirror her account. In China, gender stereotypes cast female riders as physically weak, reinforcing a gendered allocation of tasks in which couples sharing one platform account have the husband ride while the wife handles navigation, pickups, and customer interaction, concealing the supporting worker’s labour contribution. Women are drawn to delivery work for its scheduling flexibility, yet childcare responsibilities constrain their ability to work peak hours, contributing to documented gender income disparities. Female riders also face gender-specific risks, including harassment and assault, and respond with strategies such as concealing their femininity, avoiding workplace socialising, and building women’s networks. Their labour is thus more likely to be physically concealed, structurally disadvantaged by algorithmic management, and economically devalued, obscuring the true scale of women’s contributions to the sector.

The third facet concerns perceived transgressions of norms and boundaries. Per-delivery payments and algorithmic penalties pressure riders to speed and take risks, while surge pricing during bad weather directly incentivises dangerous behaviour, externalising financial risk onto workers. Riders swerve through traffic, exploiting physical gaps and regulatory grey areas to maximise hourly earnings, and may resort to riding on sidewalks as both a breach of traffic law and a safety strategy. Waiting between gigs is an unpaid precondition of platform labour, and with companies increasingly refraining from providing hubs or warehouses, riders must spend waiting times in public, relying on the goodwill of restaurant owners for restrooms, meals, and charging. Martin, a courier since 2015, puts it bleakly: older delivery services had offices to go to, but riders now have literally nowhere to go, sitting on sidewalks or benches, seen as people not doing anything. Their forced presence even serves platforms strategically, rendering them human billboards whose unpaid visibility advertises instant convenience while their labour value is degraded.

From these findings, the authors propose expanding the analytical framework with two spatial dimensions that cut across all three (in)visibility domains: the material conditions of platform labour, and the social-practice dynamics, ideologies, and norms shaping workers’ lived experiences. Drawing on feminist relational ontologies from digital geography, they conceptualise space as a dynamic constellation of material and embodied relations rather than a bounded category. The spatial conditions of platform labour are not only relational but also relative: one rider may be reduced to an on-demand labourer while another experiences platform environments as spaces of opportunity, depending on migrant status, race, and gender. Riders’ affordances are continuously negotiated, and by transgressing established norms of road and public space use, riders exercise agency to claim space, making resistance a co-constitutive act of spatial production.

Applying the expanded framework exposes the contradictions of visible invisibility across all domains. Informal labour arrangements and piece wages create time pressures with tangible traffic effects, encouraging speeding that transgresses public space norms, yet these same practices increase riders’ individual visibility within the platform ecosystem through higher commissions and performance metrics. Riders’ joint presence in public space is crucial for solidarity, yet it is equally a product of institutional invisibility, claimed primarily for unremunerated tasks from which platforms extract value. The authors conclude that protecting platform workers cannot be achieved through labour law alone; it requires critical scrutiny of transportation policy and prevailing cultural norms around gendered, racialised, and classed assumptions, cycling as non-commercial mobility, and car-centric infrastructure. The question at stake, they argue, is how to maintain public space as open and accessible to all under conditions of ongoing platformisation, before the workers who sustain urban convenience remain what they have long been: visible to everyone, seen by no one.

Subject of Research: Visible yet unseen: unpacking the (in)visibilities of food-delivery riders in public space

Article Title: Visible yet unseen: unpacking the (in)visibilities of food-delivery riders in public space

Article References: Bruck, E. M., & Gruszka, K. (2026). Visible yet unseen: unpacking the (in)visibilities of food-delivery riders in public space. Geographica Helvetica, 81(4), 603-616. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-603-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-603-2026

Keywords: Visible, unseen, unpacking, visibilities, food-delivery, riders, public, space, scientific research