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The company currently sells seventeen different models, each made with a particular type of off-road rider in mind. There are bikes optimized for perfect handling on long, technical descents, bikes made for people who mainly tackle the rolling hills of a local singletrack loop, bikes that are super efficient on the way up rocky climbs, and even gravel bikes that are pretty efficient on paved roads. To figure out which will work best for you, take the company’s bike finder quiz. All the bikes are priced within a pretty similar range, with the exception of the battery-powered electric options.
The Best Affordable Bike Brand: State
Most people looking to buy a bike want something with multiple gears so that they can shift to better tackle changes in street gradient. There’s nothing worse than being in a hard, powerful gear when you’re trying to climb a steep hill. Others choose to ride bikes with a single set of gears for the sake of simplicity (and savings) or the sheer flex. If you’re a true novice cyclist, I wouldn’t recommend a single-speed bike, since it’ll make keeping up with your friends or any small hill a real challenge. But if you’re interested in trying one out, consider one from the popular, affordable brand State Bicycle Co. Its entry-level Core Line bikes are well made and the company’s customer support teams are responsive. If you have any issues, they should be able to take care of you.
The Best Fixed-Gear Bike Brand: Affinity
Fixed Gear bikes were massively popular in the early 2010s, mostly associated with gauge-wearing hipsters in cities like Portland and New York. Like single-speed bikes, they offer no other options for gears you can change into. But fixed-gear bikes do not have a freewheel, a component that allows your bike’s rear wheel to keep spinning if you stop pedaling. If you find yourself going downhill on a fixed gear bike, then, you have to make sure you keep pedaling as fast as your bike will want you to. Stopping on a fixed-gear bike can also be a challenge, especially since many fixed-gear bikes don’t come with brakes.
This dynamic forces you into a constant and active conversation with your bike, which fixie enthusiasts usually say makes all other kinds of bike riding feel kind of mindless. Sheldon Brown, a bike mechanic and author of “Fixed Gear Bicycles for the Road,” referred to the feeling of riding a fixie as an “almost mystical connection.”
The team at Affinity Cycles specializes in producing extremely handsome frames with geometry designed for riding a fixed gear. You’ll have to buy almost all the other components you’ll need—including handlebars, wheels, pedals, a crankset, and a chain—separately, but that’s part of the fun. A fixie should be as unique as its rider, and your local bike shop should have plenty of gear that speaks to your specific aesthetic sensibility.
The Best Old-School Bike Brand: Rivendell
Most bicycle companies chase the future, updating their entire product line each year with bikes that have the latest greatest in frame geometry and aerodynamics, but also in their components. Rivendell is quite different. The company’s bikes are unabashedly retro, employing the kinds of brakes and shifting mechanisms you would have seen on new bikes produced in the 80s and 90s. That’s because, as Rivendell founder Grant Petersen put it in a recent New Yorker profile, these components, with practice, work just as well as more modern versions, while also being much simpler to live with. If you buy a Rivendell, for instance, you’ll never have to worry whether your derailleur is charged.
FAQ
How much should I expect to pay for a new bike?
You are not mistaken: New bikes have gotten a lot more expensive. “To get a bike that used to cost you like $500, you now usually have to pay at least $700,” says Graven-Milne. A lot of this acceleration happened during the pandemic, when demand for bikes spiked just as the production of bikes and bike components all but completely halted. Four years out, the demand has softened, so some people expect prices to cool.
Nikahim says to start by trying to think about the type of cyclist you want to become. Are you imagining yourself riding upright and comfortable on city streets as you navigate morning traffic? Do you think you’ll want to kit yourself out in spandex and rip it as fast as possible around the paved loops of your local park? Or, can you see yourself taking your bike out into the woods and rolling over more varied terrain, like gravel or dirt?
Once you have a sense of this, look for a great local bike shop, says Weiss, “If you’re someone who is not a mechanic, who is just getting started in cycling, the most important thing [to do] is go to a shop where people are going to help you and listen to you and give you support.”
The people at your local bike shop, by nature of also being local cyclists, are going to understand the needs for cyclists in that area, says Rome. Whether that’s related to weather or terrain, they can help direct you to a bike that can handle it. “I think there’s a lot of value in the local bike shop versus what most people do now, which is just to go down a rabbit hole of internet advice that doesn’t necessarily get to the right answer very quickly,” he says. Any good shop will allow you to try out the new bikes they sell, which can help you identify what details about a bike are important to you.
What about direct-to-consumer bike brands?
“In cycling, brands don’t equal manufacturer…You’re often buying something from a brand, but it’s made by someone else,” Rome explains. He says there are only a few dozen manufacturers of bikes throughout the world that produce bikes for hundreds and hundreds of different brands. There’s been even more manufacturer centralization since the pandemic, says Graven-Milne. “The quality of a certain bike isn’t always correlated to the brand name attached to it,” she says, though there are some smaller DTC brands that have a sterling reputation.
A lot of those smaller DTC brands sell directly to the consumer at a slightly lower price than you’d get at a bike shop. The only problem: You often have to assemble the bike yourself at home. If you’re an experienced rider, this might not be an issue. But Graven-Milne says lots of people come into their shop with bike that they assembled themselves that are now having issues that could have been avoided with property assembly. “People are sometimes like, ‘If you can assemble Ikea furniture, you can build a bike out of a box. It’s the same thing.’ But I do not ride my Ikea couch down the street at 25 miles per hour.”
If you do want to buy a bike from one of these companies, Graven-Milne says to get it built at your local bike shop. “Bike shops love it when you bring them a bike-in-a-box,” she says. “You can probably even just ship it directly to the shop, as long as you let them know in advance.”
What about bikes from big box stores?
The experts we spoke to for this story cautioned against buying any bikes from big box stores and online warehouses, especially in the below $500 price range. These kinds of bikes, which Graven-Milne says mechanics often refer to as “bicycle-shaped objects,” often arrive with signs they were welded together poorly and fitted with counterfeit components. “It will look like a bicycle to someone that doesn’t really know about bicycles. But it’s more like if you were trying to buy a car and you ended up with a golf cart.”
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