chriswoody
Legendary Member
- Location
- Northern Germany
Obviously there are alternatives in the sense that there are other folding bikes. Depending from your use case they may be an alternative or not and you may have to live with some disadvantages or may get some advantages from them.
But it is silly to claim there would be alternatives if you did not have the chance to really compare those to a Brompton in daily use over a longer period of time. If you did not do that claiming the "alternative" is just plain phantasy as you don't really know what you are talking about and obviously everyone suffers from ownership-bias, Brompton owners as well as owners of other bikes.
I do own a lot of different folding bikes and to me there is no real alternative to the Brompton - but obviously there are use cases where a Brompton is not best suited for or where other bikes are better. The surprise is how well a Brompton fits to a lot of usage scenarios to a very good or at least acceptable amount whereas most other folders do have their issues here: They are in most cases not as universal or not as good fitting as a Brompton. A lot of this has to do with the fold and the small size of the package.
If you barely fold and don't have to rely on taking the bike with you where ever you go and on a small fold there are indeed alternatives. But you cannot imagine the advantages and change in practicabilty through the small package of a folded Brompton if you only talk about it in theory w/o having experienced it.
Like me, you live in Germany and know that train stations, apartment buildings etc all contain a lot of stairs. So I totally agree with you that having a bike that folds small and is easy to move around/carry in the state is a huge boon. There is no argument that a Brompton excels in that situation, however, I'm in the fortunate situation that I can easily carry my Tern up and down the stairs in the train station and the bike also easily fits in my Golf for when I need to, so for me, fold size is not an issue.
Aside from fold size, which I agree on, your post makes no other concrete argument why I should spend three times as much as my bike cost, so that I can then claim that I know what I'm talking about when I state my €400 Tern is equal to a Brompton in many other areas and is actually a very viable alternative.