I live and work in the semi-urban part of my town. The buildings on the main streets are two or three stories high with store fronts on the ground floor and apartments or offices on the floors above with a few seven or eight story buildings scattered about and few parking lots.
Because of this, except for my main shopping day and an occasional trip to BFE I use my bike to get around.
I think people like me are an under served market segment. I don't need a 36 speed, super shocked, hard core mountain bike or a ball crushing, a seat up the ass racing bike. Since there lots of hills in the area, a simple one speed cruiser will not do either. But, believe it or not, that isn't the subject of this entry.
As an apartment dweller in an area with lots of retail establishments, bike storage is a problem.
I can't keep it outside. Like retailers, bums like to be where the foot traffic is. It makes for better panhandling. The problem is that when the panhandling doesn't pan out (yuk yuk), they steal, and they will steal anything, including parts of an unattended bicycle. It would take a good ten minutes to secure all the parts of a bike well enough so that they couldn't be stolen. And then there is the weather issue -- rain being bad for metal and all.
So that leaves keeping it in my apartment, which I do and it sucks. With the handle bars, pedals and room to lean it, a bike takes up as much room as a small couch.
My ceilings are only eight feet high, so suspending it isn't an option.
I looked into folding bikes and they aren't for fat people. At three bills, I'm way over their weight limits. Even if I was in shape, they couldn't handle my weight and a couple bags of groceries. So they're out.
The thing is, all the manufacturers need to to is enable us to quickly and easily significantly reduce one dimension of of the bike. The easiest would be the width, that is just handle bars and pedals. It would be fairly simple to make the pedals flip up and back and latch in their positions. A similar mechanism could be made for handle bars. This is not difficult engineering. People have been making collapsible things for thousands of years.
One last thing I want is a parking brake. As it stands now I can't lean it against the wall without the front wheel rolling and the bike falling. My low tech solution is a length of bungee cord tied around the handle that I use to hold the brake down when the bike is in my apartment.
I don't think I'm asking too much of the manufacturers.
Finally, it must be remembered that once the walking dead have overrun the earth, the infrastructure for cars will be gone, yet it will be a few years before the roads are impassable by bikes.
Unfortunately our concerns won't be limited to zombies. Other survivors can't be counted on to be as civilized as they once were, so we will need to take our bikes into our hidey holes at night. Given the expected weight loss in this situation, a folding bike would be fine.
