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.