I think even horses was more of an upper class thing. Most humans throughout our modern history have used their own muscle power for work and transportation. In poorer rural communities a bicycle is immensely helpful in getting your products to a market more quickly and economically then walking. This is as true today as it was in the early 19th century.

I've seen rural roads in poorer parts of Eastern Europe some decades ago. They definitely used bicycles and found them useful, but that was more of a fair weather type of thing. And bikes were exclusively used to get one person from point A to point B; to carry goods they preferred 4 wheel vehicles, either motorized or not.

Perhaps that's just my experience.

You're right about horses. Oxen were the preferred power source to move goods. Sometimes donkeys. Horses were used for the same purposes, but that indicated the owner was definitely not on the lowest rung on the social ladder. The context here is the Eastern Bloc decades ago.

I remember oxen being more practical and cheaper but not as high status as horses from Laura Ingalls Wilder's books.

> I'm just not sure about road surface quality back then. I suspect that was a bigger limiting factor.

It was a limiting factor for modern bikes too, sealed roads were invented to make cycling easier.