Moving 400 million packages during the four-week holiday season is a big job.

UPS, the mammoth delivery company, tackles it with hundreds of cargo jets, thousands of big rigs, tens of thousands of those familiar brown delivery vans — and Justin Hurst’s bike.

A UPS delivery bike. Really.

Hurst is one of about two dozen UPS workers who are pedaling up to homes in Silicon Valley this holiday season pulling trailers full of iPods, books, shoes, jewelry, toaster ovens and who-knows-what to be wrapped, unwrapped and swooned over. Think of them as the special forces in UPS’s holiday battle to get what you want from there to here.

“People are like really happy to see us bike around,” says Hurst, 22, who rides a route in Palo Alto. “They like to see us not using cars.”

Yes, happy to see him, and a bit surprised. Although UPS has used bikes on the West Coast for a few years now, this is the first season they’ve appeared in some local neighborhoods. So when Hurst pedals down the street, jaws drop, joggers stop and cameras come out. The 19th century delivery system is an odd sight in 21st century Silicon Valley, especially when the delivery dude works for UPS, a company known for staggering sophistication when it comes to logistics.

“We’re bringing the old school back,” says UPS spokeswoman Rhoda Daclison-Dickey. It’s old school serving as the linchpin to one of America’s most modern transactions: e-commerce, a retail sector that saw about $130 billion in U.S. sales last year. When Hurst loads his Burley trailer, he piles on two dozen boxes from Amazon.com, Apple, Zappos.com, Drugstore.com, Shutterfly and the fruits of Web purchases from all manner of brick-and-mortar stores.

You might think UPS’s bike initiative is a case of Big Brown going green. In fact, bike deliveries are more about saving green. Daclison-Dickey says that in years past the company would rent additional trucks to handle the crush of the peak delivery season.

“It was no longer cost-effective to rent these big Budget trucks to deliver packages,” she says. “We had to figure out alternative ways to get people’s packages to them within the time frame we committed to.”

And so, the regional office bought a fleet of bicycles with trailers ($700 per set) to replace the rentals in San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Fremont.

UPS efficiency engineers look for neighborhoods that are flat, fairly densely populated and bike-friendly. Each morning trucks drop off trailers or deliver packages to temporary storage pods placed in neighborhood parking lots. The riders load up, empty their trailers and then come back for more.

The bike initiative, which totals 45 routes throughout Northern California, should eliminate the need for 20 to 25 rental trucks and save UPS about $45,000 to $50,000 in fuel and maintenance costs in the region, Daclison-Dickey says.

And that doesn’t account for all the good will the bikers are earning for UPS. The slender Hurst doesn’t exactly look like a rock star perched on his Jamis Commuter seven-speed, wearing a brown uniform, black bike helmet and reflective vest. But the attention he gets belies the decidedly nerdy attire.

“This is very cool,” says Anne Taylor, who met Hurst at the door of her Hamilton Avenue home. “It’s such a throwback.”

A you’re-never-going-to-believe-this kind of throwback, which was the problem retiree Gordon Poulson was having with his wife, who spends her days at work while Poulson works around the house. He’d been telling her for days about these bike delivery guys. She wasn’t buying it.

And so Poulson stops Hurst on Greenwood Avenue and asks him to pose for a picture for proof.

“I think it’s a lot more personal,” Poulson says of bike deliveries, “because you can wave at them going down the street, have a conversation, ask him how their day is going.”

For Hurst, most days are going fine. He has ponchos and plastic tarps for the rain and layers for the cold, says Hurst, a history and political science major who recently graduated from the University of Oregon. The job is a temporary gig, Hurst says, something to make a little money (riders’ pay averages $10 an hour, UPS says) while he figures out his next move.

“This is a great job to have,” he says. “I like working outdoors, being on my feet, moving around.”

No worries there. With a few hundred million packages to go between now and Christmas, Hurst is going to be moving around plenty.

Contact Mike Cassidy at mcassidy@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5536. Follow him at http://twitter.com/mikecassidy.