Originally Posted by JeffS
Not to pick on you, but this is a perfect example of our common contradiction.
Teenagers get USED cars. We're not standing around asking for more $7000 Daewoo/Yugo/etc cars so teenagers can drive.
I have been surprised, especially in this forum, that more new riders aren't directed towards used bikes more. Yes, they don't want to spend a lot of money, and yes, they don't know what they want/need, but that's the whole point. Most of the time, a $150 used bike will be a vastly superior product to the $150 new bike.
True, but I guess I'm thinking that approach may not be as easy to translate to bicycles, since our (U.S., at least) society is so car-centric. You can pretty easily find a halfway decent used car, just by driving down the road or looking through the classifieds. Most people are at least somewhat comfortable with deciding whether to buy a used car based on a test drive and maybe having a relative or the neighborhood shadetree mechanic take a cursory look at it. But I don't think most (non-"real cyclist")people are savvy enough about bicycles to call up somebody who's listed a bike for sale in the classifieds, take a quick spin on it, and tell a huge difference between that $150 used bike and the $100-$150 brand new one down at Wally World or Sports Authority. Sure, we know it probably is vastly superior, but to Jane or John Doe, it's the same price and it's used, so the shiny new one must be better. And, at least in my random look-sees at what passes for the "used bicycle dealer" (pawn shops), most of the big line of used bikes chained up out front are those same quintuple suspension toy bikes from the big box places, or rusted out 30-year-old 10-speeds from Sears.
If we really wanted bicycles to be considered a viable form of transportation we would treat them as commodities instead of disposable toys. This cannot be done by the majority of bike retailers who make their money off of new bike sales.
Yeah, but how do we get there? As long as the big boxes are selling the $100-$150 brand new "toy" bike (which serves even plenty of daily commuters well enough--generalizing, obviously, but thinking primarily of the low-income immigrant workers for whom those bikes are primary transportation), and unless we get to $10 a gallon gas or whatever level it takes before more people start parking their cars and looking for alternatives, I still think there's a vast unserved middle ground which could be targeted with a decent quality/low cost new bike (which, in my little fantasy world here, would then result in more people looking for higher priced bikes, more decent used bikes on the market, and more people with the awareness/knowledge of what makes a good bike so they could advise the teens in search of their first good used bike).