I've been looking at folding bikes like this.. in my case, I'm a private pilot, and I'm looking for ways to solve the last mile issue of getting from my destination airport to somewhere fun to go - ie a nearby beach, or into town for dinner, etc. Size and weight are important in my use case, since general aviation aircraft don't have alot of cargo space.
This bike looks like it would be a decent fit, but I'm not sure I can convince myself to shell out 1500 bucks for it... So the search for a last mile solution continues :-)
Similarly I like to get very cheap ($40-$70) round trip flights to random town and explore around. Unfortunately my uber from the airport to the town is usually more expensive than the flight. Most small towns don't have much in the way of airport buses.
Out of Denver, and I use the date grid on google flights. Frontier and spirit fly to Miami pretty consistently for a $80 round trip, but most flights are to like bentonville, AR or similarly random places.
The key is to people able to take a flight at any time and day, so you can always take the cheapest options. But also if you book 2 months in advance you can go anywhere in the Caribbean/central America on spirit for $100 or so.
Why not take an rideshare/taxi? It seems you'd be able to even optimally schedule the rides in advance. I wouldn't want to ride this thing on car-only roads.
I live in Michigan, and especially since Covid, many of the small towns in this state have no taxi or rideshare options. Cadillac MI is one example - big enough town that there's some stuff to go do, but only a single taxicab and no rideshare. The single taxi is fairly unreliable. The saving grace at Cadillac is that the airport has a courtesy car you can arrange to borrow, but that's more and more rare.
Ground transportation at a whole lot of the places I can fly to is just nonexistent or not at all reliable. I expect much of the rest of the country probably has similar issues..
Not sure which destination you picked, but KCAD to Clam Lake Brewery is closer to 3 miles, and that's the general area that I'm usually headed to in Cadillac. I take your point about rollerblades, though, it's certainly an option!
This bike looks like it would be a decent fit, but I'm not sure I can convince myself to shell out 1500 bucks for it... So the search for a last mile solution continues :-)