I’ll be the first to tell you I’m not a big biker. As such, I’ve never bought an expensive bike. I’ve ridden the ones accessible to me: gifts from family members, hand-me-downs, old, public clunkers and ones you can borrow from hotel lobbies. I’ve never had a road bike; never fussed with a fixie; and never considered the kind of roads I was riding on, because, well, I was commuting. I knew my route and, unless construction detoured me, I stuck to it.
Products in the Guide
-
State Bicycle Single-Speed 4130
Read more
But then I transitioned to working from home. I picked up biking again, this time to lazily ride to dinner or to a shop across town. My latest bike, however — a half-decade old and the victim of more than a few New York City crashes — wasn’t quite ready for its return in my new city of Pittsburgh. Two consecutive rides resulted in flat rear tires, and the entire bike creaked loud enough, you could hear me coming several blocks away.
To learn more about our testing methodology and how we evaluate products, head here.
I visited my local bike shop, where they said I’d spend as much fixing this one, a cheap but very kind gift, as I would buying something brand-new. Plus, they said, my new routes required a bike with better durability. The roads here in Pittsburgh are rough: for those unfamiliar with this little city’s conditions, streets are bumpy, notoriously hole-y, patched with steel plates, and usually cramming two-way traffic into a space that should really only be for one direction. It’s harsh for cars, let alone bikers. (One street swallowed a bus whole a few years ago.) But people do it. And I was ready to, too.
