Doorways. furniture, your tv, walls.
All of these things can severely limit your ability to swing. And, miss recovery has always been an issue for weapons that use rotational energy. (bat, club, sock-flail, sword, wood-axe,machete).
Yes, with a good solid hit the rotational energy weapons can deal a whole heck-load of damage. And with training you can up your chances of getting a good solid hit in circumstances such as.....just woke up, dark, middle of the night, in the middle of a doorway, intruder swinging a bat at YOU....
There are alot of reasons why the spear/polearm style weapon has been the most widely used in history.
3 of them being...
1) easier/quicker to make/convert from available tools.
2) far....far...lower level of training required to become effective.
3) distance = good when it's someone wanting to hurt you.
A hay fork. Those tines can easily pushed into/through a leg. And with not much force at all, if you hit bone, it will embed and STICK. A thrusting motion is far quicker to practice, and learn how to recover from, than a rotational motion. You could probably Jab at someone 3-4 times for each time you could swing the bat/machete, even assuming you have practiced hitting with the bat backhand and don't have to bring it all the way back to position one (a bigger issue with a single edged weapon like the machete, an issue that can be overcome with martial arts training, but why deal with overcoming an issue when there are options that don't have that issue?). And you can be more precise with it.
But, if you are in the middle of a big city, it might be impractical to even find a store that would carry a hay pitch-style fork.
An easy fix, easy-to-make at home spear.
Get an 8 inch chef's knife. Make sure it has a full-tang. Get a decent metal stand lamp.
Cut off the extraneous. Drill into it and affix the full-tang chef's knife to one end with some large bolts through the tang. Also re-enforce the screw-together length of it.
better to do the same with a hockey-stick/lacrosse stick + knife. This would not be as light as the lamp, and the materials aren't as easily obtained, but would be much stronger/sturdier