Originally Posted by
sha90
my commute and shopping are all less than two miles. i am in honolulu and we don't have great bike infrastructure but i am grateful for anything. beats walking!
And that is the shame of being a cyclist in the US. bikes have been viewed as recreation, not transportation for the last half a century; Americans just like their cars too much.
There are very few places in the US that people can live close enough to work, shopping, and services, AND have safely cycleable routes between them, to provide much of a market for those kinds of bikes. Nobody wants to build, market or import a bunch of bikes that won’t sell, no matter how cheap they are.
Brands like Priority and PureFix make some decent city bikes, but you pay a little premium for the image and style, like a $5 cup of coffee from Starbucks.
The IKEA bike had some real promise, but the company got cold feet and pulled it off the market over a really minor design flaw.