Would you buy a used bike?

I was confronted with this question recently while pondering my twin desires to lose weight and get active but also not wanting to spend a few hundred pounds on something that I might never use.

I should get a bike. I hate public transport and I don't drive. My daily commute would double up as exercise, I could feel smug about 'being part of the solution' and annoy car drivers all at the same time. However, I could hardly feel all warm and cosy and green if I knew that about 500 pounds of greenhouse gases are produced in making a bike. And given the typical US diet (which is not the typical worldwide diet but the UK is moving that way...) it would take about 400 miles of cycling to make the bike carbon neutral. They are expensive too, so surely a second hand one is a good bet right?

In the UK alone there are thousands of bikes discarded every year in towns and cities up and down the country. According to one article in the Guardian in Oxford alone almost 600 hundred in one year, and while cycling is popular in Oxford it is by no means unique. So, I thought about the cycle recycling shops as a place to try.

Fortunately some nice folk have compiled this list of places where you can buy a second hand refurbished bike. Trouble is, they are not that much cheaper than a new bike. Ok, so there is the cost of replacement parts, labour, premises and so forth to take care of but really, for a few pounds more I could have a brand new one. So the bargain hunter in me took to Gumtree, Craigslist and other private traders. Then it struck me that while a lot of bikes get abandoned every year by students going home who can't be bothered paying for a removal van (or who are international students, slightly more understandable) many, many more must be stolen. One every minute according to this  introduction from BikeOff. I won't do the annoying Bob Geldoff-esque clicking fingers but that strikes me as a lot. And since hardly any of those are ever returned (The police do their jobs? Reminds me of this clip from the Big Lebowski) how can we trust a private seller? Can we? I suspect not.

So, there we have it. Fleeced by Halfords, overpay for recycled or engage in the illicit black market trade. It seems the consumer is not going to be the winner in this case but I guess the re-cylced option is best because at least if I don't decide to keep cycling I won't be yet another individual who purchased a brand new bike, made in China from metal mined in South America, had it shipped all the way to the UK, only for it to end up as scrap by winter.