A velocipede at best saves you a bit of energy going flat or downhill, with relatively little increase in speed, with a relatively high capital expense. Compared with walking and horses, it doesn't help much.
You have to get all the way to the safety bicycle (with pneumatic tires) before you have something that beats walking for someone that is not a cycling enthusiast.
It's a bit like the question of why the steam engine wasn't invented earlier. It was invented to pump water out of coal mines. Being 2% efficient (for the original model) didn't matter, since it was only used to mine its own fuel. I don't think we'd ever get to modern steam and later internal combustion engines without coal deposits making the initial prototype feasible, and then funding continual improvements.
By that sort of logic, we are lucky that European aristocrats were bored and enjoyed scary proto-bicycles, or we'd still not have them today. The final safety bicycle is practically a Segway by comparison with four wheel carriages.
for example, I think one-wheeled devices / unicycles are crazy and only someone with a lot of time, energy and motivation will to learn to balance and use one.
But nowadays computers make it possible for normal people to use them without as much skill.
We might have a "why did we wait so long for simple one-wheeled transportation?"
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another analogous musing -- why did we start with main+tail rotor helicopters?
Nowadays 4-rotor quadcopters appeared and have taken over.
The quadcopter advantage is in it's mechanical simplicity, but having fewer longer blades is better for aerodynamic efficiency(at the expense of max airspeed). This matters less at RC scale, but at full size, even an all-electric helicopter will likely have more range than a quadcopter with the same batteries.
lunatuna•55m ago