Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?
One possibly overlooked factor: the nature of travel has changed dramatically in the last 200 years. Right up until World War 1, my ancestors literally had no reason to ever go more than ten miles from home, and even that was rare. The entire extended family lived within a two mile radius. This was because they were all farmers, and farmers didn&#x27;t need to travel often. Furthermore, if you did travel, well, you already had a horse. Which, to make a point not made in the article, didn&#x27;t have to do with the cost of the horse; it had to do with the fact that you already needed to have a horse to farm. So the horse was a sunk cost.<p>If you did travel frequently, this was likely because you were in the business of shipping goods, ie tobacco or cotton or some other agricultural staple from where it was grown to a port, and hence speed wasn&#x27;t your primary concern; inexpensive transport for bulk goods was. For all that is awesome about bicycles, bulk transports they aren&#x27;t.<p>So: at least one factor was economic, but of an indirect sort. We had to have a critical mass of population that needed to travel regularly farther than they could conveniently walk, and for which horses were not sunk costs.