While it’s maybe surprising, have you ever tried riding something with a 1:1 drive ratio? There’s a reason even bikes with a fixed gear still have gears...
Pedals connected directly to the front wheel would be truly awful for virtually all adult bicycle use cases.
Well, the obvious contender for that is the penny farthing. It’s not dreadful (it was good enough to be commercialised with vague success at least), but it’s inconvenienced by the necessary size of the front wheel to make any progress, and the fact that you can’t have a front-wheel brake as you just rotate over the top of the bicycle when applied.
Have you seen a human ride a penny farthing? I don’t think dreadful is overstating it. Sure it made the most of available technology at the time, but one doesn’t need to be expert in bikes to see why this design died.
Just getting on a Penny Farthing can be problematic, given it tries to compensate for 1:1 drive by using an enormous front wheel.
Yep, there’s a bunch of late-Victorian enthusiasts who ride them around London every year: https://pennyfarthingclub.com/
They have obvious faults of course, but they were around for 15-20 years, were better than their predecessors, and didn’t kill off the concept of the bicycle in general to stop future development. That’s enough to give them some credit at least!
Pedals connected directly to the front wheel would be truly awful for virtually all adult bicycle use cases.