I've had a total opposite experience on CL in Los Angeles. Ok, not with selling bike stuff, but selling perfectly good household items up to $500.

Put up multiple items, with good pictures, and VERY fair pricing, and got a lot of interest, immediately, most of which seemed local and legit. Unfortunately, when I set up appointments to meet people to do the transaction, people simple wouldn't show, or if they did they came so late that it wasn't even worth it for me to sell the item. By the time I unloaded one item, I'd waited for a total of 4 hours for 3 separate people, and the final buyer was an hour late.

My other items had people come over, take a look, decide they didn't want it, and leave. That's perfectly fine, but it's a risk you take as a seller, and when that happens with 3 people, you just wasted a good 2-3 hours as well since these folks also tend to come within a 30 minute window, which means you're home for a 60 min window.

After selling 4 items on CL this way, which took nearly 3-4 hours total for each item given the large number of no shows and the several buyers who decided against buying, I decided it was simply no longer worth it. I was more than happy to place the item on Ebay, pay the commission, but have a buyer who was totally committed and for whom I wouldn't need to waste so much time with.

Might be different with bikes if the buyers are more excited about the purchase and are thus more punctual, but it was a huge timewaster for me with non-bike items. And of course, aggressive pricing helps - my household items were harder for sellers to see they were getting a good deal since it's harder to price those than recent-gen bikes for which there's often a pretty clearly known ebay or online price, so people are much more inclined to close deals for well priced items.