A city bike is an ordinary bicycle designed for the practical business of getting around a town or city, rather than for racing, touring or riding off road. It typically has an upright riding position, mudguards, a chain guard and often a basket or pannier rack, all aimed at comfort and convenience over short daily journeys rather than speed. The phrase is used straightforwardly as a product description, by manufacturers, shops and riders alike, to distinguish this kind of everyday machine from a road bike or a mountain bike.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘city bike’?
The origin of the phrase in this literal sense is not settled. One glossary of cycling terminology states that the label “City Bike” first came into use in the late 1970s in the Netherlands, applied to the sturdy upright bicycles built there for everyday urban riding. Another account puts its origin in the USA in the mid-twentieth century, an earlier date and a different country, so it is not clear whether the term was coined once in a particular place or grew up gradually wherever bicycles were being adapted for city commuting.
Separately from this practical sense, place names have long been attached to the word “bike” to describe a promiscuous person, on the joke that a bicycle belonging to a whole town or village gets ridden by everyone in it. This sense is well recorded for “town bike”, which appears in Partridge’s slang dictionary, and for “village bike” or “village bicycle”, built on the same idea that “everyone gets a ride”, used as a euphemism for sexual intercourse. “City bike” is sometimes used in this joking way too, stretching the same pattern to a larger place, but no dictionary record of it in that sense has been traced. As a phrase with its own history, “city bike” belongs to the practical, transport sense, with the ruder use best understood as a passing extension of the town and village versions rather than an established phrase in its own right.