A very well written article. I like the point about how the follies of the bike sharing business have actually got people to ride bikes. Before it was not an op

A very well written article. I like the point about how the follies of the bike sharing business have actually got people to ride bikes. Before it was not an option to hire a bike for a day, nowadays that is a thing. It takes a while for things to find their level. The 'Boris bike' is now a feature of London, the other bikes haven't established that niche in the streetscape. The road bike was also innovative, if flawed. Plenty of bikes and plenty of bike groupsets are flawed when they first come out. It takes a couple of iterations to get right and the costs of getting it wrong are terrible. Years ago in the days of the mountain bike craze a brand came out with a few of their own components including a bespoke freehub body. This did not last long on any given bike and it did not take long before the warranty returns aspect of the business fixing whole wheels took over. There was no scope to develop the brand when all hands are literally swapping tyres and tubes onto new wheels and getting them out to customers. Sometimes bikes that don't actually work don't bounce back. During the mountain bike boom there was a shortage of Shimano components and a rising Yen. This made it hard to get the gears and brakes needed to build a bike. So European components might be substituted. And they would not actually work together, no matter how skilled the mechanic, no matter how new everything was, the gears would not shift and the brakes would not stop the bike. Very few of these frankenbikes made it back. They just sat in sheds and garages, never to be ridden! The SpeedX bike was not a bike that would be just dumped in the shed or bought as a well meaning gift. They could not rely on 90% of the problems not coming back. They also were never going to do well with the cycling press. Or the industry. The cycling business is actually really conservative and there are chunks of it controlled by people who never actually ride..