One point this article misses is the size of the cities. Until mid-1800 cities were at most 1-1.5 km long, usually just 2-3 streets. Just look at old maps of Manchester. The only exceptions were the capitals like London, which were an order of magnitude more populous, but still only 2-5 times bigger in distance.
The primary means of transportation was not horse, but feet. You could walk to a destination on the other side of an average city of those times in 15 minutes, so a bike wouldn't bring big gains in time.
Only in 2nd half of 19th century, cities began growing, and transportation became a problem.
> One point this article misses is the size of the cities. Until mid-1800 cities were at most 1-1.5 km long, usually just 2-3 streets.
See perhaps:
> Marchetti's constant is the average time spent by a person for commuting each day. Its value is approximately one hour, or half an hour for a one-way trip. It is named after Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti, though Marchetti himself attributed the "one hour" finding to transportation analyst and engineer Yacov Zahavi.[1]
What about on the countryside? Villagers traveled to church and other villages regularly. That can easily take a couple of hours by foot – and by horse, at a normal pace – but would go significantly faster on bicycle.
I know there are reasons they didn't have bicycles, but I don't think "going by feet is equally good" is one of those reasons.
And while in large cities, the need for horses had subsided, anyone living a distance from a rural village on a farm would have horses in any case for work which could also be used for visiting town.
That’s really not true, you needed a pretty large farm to have both the need and income for a horse.
The horse itself cost at least a third of a labourer’s yearly income (which was not really disposable), and that does not include a sufficiently large pasture or equivalent fodder.
Not only that, but those horses would have been work implements, like a tractor today, you would usually not get those horses out to go to church or see your family a village over. If only because most of the time the horse would be at work in the fields anyway.
Yup, individuals farms far away from anything is a New World thing. In Europe villages were pretty densely populated for most of history - usually about 0.1-0.5 km2 per family. You can't afford horses with that amount of farming land (and if you're a serf you can't technically own property and you aren't allowed to leave your village anyway).
> What about on the countryside? Villagers traveled to church and other villages regularly.
"Regularly" may have been once a week (e.g., Lord's Day / Sunday). Otherwise people lived either in villages themselves, or in hamlets (collective security at night) and 'commuted' to their fields. Or on-site of the land owner if they were workers (earlier: serfs).
Living on a farmstead wasn't really a thing until relatively recently in history.
There's no point going from 1 village to another when you're a serf, and for centuries it was even illegal (at least in most of Central&Eastern Europe). Serfdom wasn't much different from slavery in practice - you couldn't own property, marry without the permission of your landlord, leave your village, etc. This only changed in 19th century.
Also villages, churches, manors, inns, markets, blacksmiths, and all the other necessary infrastructure was rarely more than 1 hour on foot away.
In my country there's 1 church per 30 km2, that's on average 6km between churches which is roughly 1 hour on foot.
Serfs were far better off than chattel slaves. A serf could not be sold away from their village, they could marry (AFAIK permission to do so was not required in most countries) and have a stable home with a spouse and kids, they had rights to the land they farmed, and could own property. It did vary between countries, and what you describe is true in some, not in others.
Serfdom declined over time in western Europe and had largely disappeared by the end of the middle ages. So it does not explain why western Europeans not invent the bicycle in that period that was at least a few centuries, sometimes longer - 800 years in some places!
The rule of thumb is that in Europe, it got worse as you went east. E.g. in Russia, the serf could be sold away from their village, and even away from their family, could effectively be stripped of any property by the owner, could be severely punished for arbitrary reasons. Just about the only thing that wasn't legal was outright murder - but even that was effectively unenforceable except in the most egregious cases involving numerous murders and torture, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darya_Nikolayevna_Saltykova.
In general, in many cases, what rights exist on paper is irrelevant; what matters is how they are applied in practice, and what avenues to enforce their rights the holders have. E.g. it is not uncommon for societies with serfdom to limit the ability of serfs to file legal petitions against their owners.
> So it does not explain why western Europeans not invent the bicycle in that period
They were too busy fighting wars, like the 100 years war. Also the Inquisition might not have seen bicycles with good eyes. The bicycle couldn't have happened without the Reinassance and the Industrial Revolution.
The primary means of transportation was not horse, but feet. You could walk to a destination on the other side of an average city of those times in 15 minutes, so a bike wouldn't bring big gains in time.
Only in 2nd half of 19th century, cities began growing, and transportation became a problem.