Pedal pubs are a new drinking concept that are beginning to gain popularity throughout the United States. For those of you who don’t know, a pedal pub is shaped like a trolley and requires the riders to pedal in order to move the quadricycle. The pedal pub then has a bar in front of each rider with a steering wheel in the center of the bar to navigate through the streets.

You can use the pedal pub in many different venues, like a bar crawl, a baseball game or a Saturday afternoon cruise through the park. Whatever your fancy, it all centers around drinking.

Recently, a pedal pub company called Pedal Tavern has had some trouble in the city of Milwaukee, where local officials and others have expressed their concerns that the pedal pubs violate Wisconsin law, which prohibits drinking in vehicles.

In response, Rep. Jeff Stone, R-Greendale, has begun to circulate a bill allowing municipalities to decide if drinking on pedal pubs would be legal within their jurisdiction.

Currently, Minnesota, Colorado and California allow pedal pub riders to consume alcohol. Under the proposed legislation, only the pedal pub navigators – the person behind the wheel – would need to keep their blood alcohol content below .02 percent, while riders would be able to consume at will.

Pedal pubs create business for both bars and the pedal pub companies. The basic idea of a pedal pub is that a group rents it for the evening and pays for it by the hour – a great opportunity for pedal pub companies to create jobs. Next, should a bar crawl be your activity of choice, the pedal pub easily navigates through the streets from bar to bar, bringing an influx of customers to each stop. The best part is that you’re able to comfortably pedal your group quickly to the next location rather than corral all your friends and slowly stumble to your next stop.

This brings me to my second point: A group of people moving en masse while drinking is arguably safer on a pedal pub than walking through the streets. The pedal pub has the added benefit of keeping party groups together and is able to comfortably move them all at once in a sitting, rather than standing, position.

The pedal pub, according to Pedal Tavern, does not move much faster than five miles per hour, which hardly poses a risk to pedestrians – especially since the pub comes with its own company-provided driver, who must stay sober.

So if you’re tired having to keep track of all your friends while they stumble through the streets, breaking their high heels and front teeth as your group simultaneously and unknowingly bumps into and offends all the other pedestrians out for a night out on the town, then the pedal pub is for you – you can be the king of the streets.

The pedal pub still has its critics who argue that the riders of the pedal pub cause too much noise and disrupt the pattern of society. In other words, they call it an unnatural way to experience the bar scene. However, from my personal experience of seeing these mobile bars travel down the street, most pedestrians merely experience a moment of silent awe, only broken to utter common phrases like, “Where can I get one”? and “How long has this existed”?

The pedal pub is the latest innovation in drinking culture, and I say we must accept it with open arms and allow this bar limousine to show us what items are still missing from our bucket lists.

Jared Mehre ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in political science, sociology and legal studies.