pcb 

I guess it depends how you define your market, how much work you want to put into the hunt and how comfy you are buying used vintage stuff based on pix and descriptions. I suppose the days of quality used road bikes for $100 are certainly gone for all but the very lucky, though.

I can understand living in a less-populated area leading to a crappy local CL market. Not a lot of product with more demand than supply might mean that pos gaspipe dept store rejects sell for $200. There are alternatives to local CL, though. There's national CL, there's ebay, there's bike shops, there's classifieds on forums like this. If you'll push your budget to $700 for a new BD bike, I gotta think the same $700 would get you a better used frame with very decent parts for the same or less money through non-CL venues. Finding sweet bikes for $200 is work and luck, finding sweet bikes for $700 doesn't have to be that hard.

There are search engines that will search national CL listings. Find somebody in Chicago or Portland or Austin or wherever who'll ship, or who'll take it to a bike shop to ship. Or go to the facilitators section here and offer cash, beer and chips to a forum member who'll get it done for you.

Try doing a completed auction search on ebay in the road bike category, using your frame size in the description. Set the $$ filter to a range of, say, $200-$600 (so you'll have room for shipping charges). That will filter out the mostly crappy and very pricey stuff. If you fit a mid-size frame you'll probably have 100+ completed auctions for sold bikes to peruse. You'll find a lot of nice bikes there. Then uncheck the "Completed Auctions" box and see what's current.

I bought a couple of cool used bikes from Sellwood Cycle in Portland, OR, though their website. One was a Merz, which turned out to be Jim's personal bike, the first bike he brazed himself, now back in his hands; the other was a Marinoni Special, now converted to 650b. Last time I checked Sellwood still had used listings, but I haven't looked for a bunch of months. They're not cheap, but they'll have photos, the bikes will have been checked over, and you can call/email and ask questions. Anybody know of any other shops that have regularly-updated used listings?

And I can almost guarantee you that if you go to the marketplace here and in similar forums and mailing lists with a generic WTB ad you'll get some hits. How many of us are sitting on way too many bikes we're maybe not aching to sell, but an ad that says: "WTB quality road bike sized xxcm-yycm with Ultegra-level components, willing to pay up to $700 shipped" would motivate us to sell one? You can get as specific or be as general as you want, "lugged steel English frame from'78-'88," "Japanese steel from the '80s," "Italian blah blah blah," whatever. [Hattori Hanzo to The Bride: "Why do you need Japanese steel?"]

Note that I have nothing against Bikes Direct. I know the owner of the company, he's got lots of bike biz experience, most definitely know what he's doing, and his product looks to be safe, functional and a strong value. If I needed a campus bike, had little bike knowledge and no wrenching skills, I'd rather buy a steel frame coaster-brake 1spd from BD than play Russian roulette on CL. Especially if the campus were mostly flat, and/or I were young, thin and fit. But if I had time, $700 and reasonable bike/wrench ninja powers, I'd be looking elsewhere.