Dahon Folding Bike

In Sept. 2006 my employment was going to take me to St. Louis for a week. In an attempt to make the best out of a week away from my family and bicycles, I looked into the St. Louis bicycling scene and found it's pretty vibrant - the nearby Katy Trail is America's longest railtrail, there's an impressive network of bike trails, and the Chain of Rocks bridge is the nation's longest bike-trail bridge. The city has bicycle guides on patrol to assist tourists and be "eyes and ears" for the downtown area. The St.Louis bike scene rocks!

But how to get a bike for the five days in town? The only bike rentals I could find, after an exhaustive search, was right across the street from my hotel on a concession at the Gateway arch - but they would only rent daily, and needed them back each evening at 7pm, and that didn't quite fit the need.

In a desperation move, I searched the bike section of the Pittsburgh Craig's List, and found two folding bikes for sale, $300 for the two of them. The first owner had bought them for his RV and Cessna310, but hardly used them - the tires still had the little rubber fingers sticking out.

We did a bit of research on the Dahon folder, and the most trenchant comment was in John Forester's Report on Stability of the Da Hon Bicycle, in which he said that the only reason to ride one of these is that they fold - if you didn't need a folder you'd never ride one of these.

My friend (and colleague) Mark, who's also travelling to St.Louis with me, and who's a much better judge of bicycles than I am, examined them and found them worthy, so for $150 apiece we each had a folding bicycle, with travel cases, seat bags, and rear racks. We figured our risk was small - if we didnt like them we could list them on CraigsList or Ebay and recoup most of the cost.

The bikes did very well for us, although they each suffered a battering during the airline flight - I think if you were going to routinely fly with them you'd want a hardshell case.