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Two months ago I decided to take up bicycling. Thanks for the advice everyone. After determining that as my learned friend @MollieTheMare indicated, the Pacific mountain bike I'd come into was kind of a piece of shit, I went hunting around for other bicycles I could borrow from people, and found myself with a menagerie of old bikes that had been sitting in garages for years or decades now sitting in my garage and being fixed up and ridden around my neighborhood. I've got a 90s Trek hybrid for girls, a 2012ish Trek hybrid for men, a remake Schwinn cruiser, and a Jamis road bike from the 2000s that I quite like but have to keep fiddling with to make work for me because it's actually the wrong size. Eventually I'm going to return all but maybe one of them to their original owners. I'm still kind of figuring out what exactly I like/want/need in a bike, and how to go about finding it.
So cycling mottizens, consider this the "What are you riding?" thread, or the "What bike would you advise someone to buy?" thread. I'm curious what the fine people of this place think is a good bike.
In my opinion, if you're mostly on the road, not doing serious distance yet, and not entirely sure what kind of riding you want to do, then a Hybrid is probably what you want. Usually they're mostly mountain bike frame and parts, but smoother tires, possibly road wheels, and at least slightly relaxed handlebars. They're usually okay-ish at pretty much everything and not terrible at anything. Maybe not quite enough tire grip and wheel strength for semi-serious trail riding, and not quite comfortable enough for long rides at high effort level compared to a road bike, but you probably won't notice until you actually try to do those things.
You probably want brand names on everything, but not top-end stuff. Usually means Shimano parts and pretty much any brand advertised and sold in actual bicycle stores. 2012ish Trek hybrid sounds decent as long as it comes reasonably close to fitting you. I don't honestly know what that runs these days, but used is probably a good deal. Bikes like this will usually go thousands of miles without breaking stuff, and are easy to fix or replace parts on if needed. The Walmart specials tend to start falling apart after a few hundred miles and be difficult to fix or find replacement parts for.
It may take some experience to understand how road bikes are really supposed to fit and work. You should be leaning forward enough to put significant weight on your hands. The drop bars provide several places to put your hands to help with this strain. Between putting significant force on the pedals most of the time and keeping some weight on your hands, there shouldn't be that much weight on the seat most of the time, so it's not meant to be that comfortable for just tooling around.
The only bike I actually have right now is a fixed-gear on a road bike frame I built many years ago. It's decently fun and comfortable for most things for me, and ugly enough to not be an attractive theft target. The lack of gears make it not that great for climbing hills/bridges, but it's okay for me on the ones near me. Also not great for carrying cargo, but I don't have much need for that now. I used to have a nice hybrid like the one I'm suggesting, which had decent saddlebags for cargo, but it got stolen a while ago. I do miss it a bit, but I wouldn't have storage room for it now anyways. I sold my nicer road bike a while ago too, since I don't ride long-distance much anymore.
It might also be worth getting a setup for changing out tire tubes that you can ride with if you are interested in riding at least moderately far away from home and civilization.
Interesting how that is a consideration I don't really have for this purchase, but is clearly important for others. 90% of my rides start and end at my house, the rest are on trails in parks, and none of them feature public stops.
I've been embarrassed by this already. I actually really like how the road bike rides when I get it under way, but getting it under way ends up being significantly harder or more clumsy than the more upright bikes.
The only thing that makes me consider pushing a bigger budget, like $500 rather than $200, that some of the newer bikes I see around are 1x10 or 1x12 gear systems. The 3x8 systems you see on most used bikes seem to add a lot of complexity for very little benefit (to me). Older bikes too, but nothing that's both working and cheap. One of those weird manufacturing moment-in-time things where for a while 24 speeds was really difficult to do from a manufacturing perspective and became the standard of excellence, and now you're starting to see less of it for the same reason: everyone can do it, so let's see what the best thing to do is.
Supposedly, the reason for fewer gears is that back wheels have improved to a bigger range of teeth, which means you can hit a similar range of gear ratios with only 1x12... and of course derailleurs are everyone's least favorite part of mountain bikes.
I assumed that the advantage of the 3x system was using a front shift to rapidly change gears, going from 3-5 to 2-5 only takes one shift where going from 1-12 to 1-7 takes five shifts. I would think the speed/reliability of the shifter would be the limiting factor here, though that might be my lack of exposure to higher end bikes.
3x systems are really more of a vestige of "More Speeds!" marketing that was devilishly effective against consumers. Secondarily, there were the engineering reasons:
1x is all the rage right now for many of the reasons you've stated, and because the cycling industry has to reinvent what's popular to sell more. 2x Drivetrains have the same-or-greater ranges than the 3x systems of old. Note that 6/7/8-speed bikes all use the same chain size, and 8 is the most ubiquitous gearing out there. Once you get to 11/12/13 every drivetrain component is more expensive and proprietary.
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