If I ever get into recreational cycling I need to make a mental note to not read about any performance stuff ever again. I'll get something rigid with relatively wide tires and disk brakes and not give two shits about weight or stiffness. I'm not nor have I ever been someone looking to shave seconds off in a race, I'm just some naturally unfit guy that happens to love riding bikes.
Also need to stop talking to other cyclists online. "Oh yeah 100 miles is easy", not for me it isn't.
A good amount of “legacy” bike advocates are actively hostile to e-bikes, equating them to “cheating”. It’s gatekeeping bullshit.
Anytime someone asks me bike buying advice, my only reply is “go to your local dealer and talk with them”. That relationship and taking a few test rides are far more important than any spec on a sheet.
The thing about bikes is that if you want to go fast, you have to put in kilometers on the saddle. That trains not just your body, but also your mind, and teaches you how to behave on the road. An electric bike allows someone with little training to go much faster than they would be able to otherwise. Now imagine that you're an experienced rider going at a cool 35 km/h and as you're about to pass a newbie on an electric bike they swerve into you because they don't yet have the habit of looking back before moving sideways. Yes, it's a mistake of that particular person alone, but it's a mistake they were able to make because e-bikes exist.
...and yet car-on-car accidents are still a major source of premature deaths, to mention nothing of when the cyclist is the victim. The potential to do great harm has to be the overwhelming factor when assessing road risk.
> There are civil, if not criminal, penalties for...
Not really, or not enough at least. Drivers can and do cause horrific accidents because of inattention, bad judgement, intoxication, and road rage. There aren't enough penalties and, it seems, the situation has been getting worse and more chaotic lately, at least where I live in the Northeastern US.
We're not living in a utopis. Drivers can do whatever they can get away with. If the other party has a dashcam, then they maybe boned if the police can be motivated to do their job for once without murdering someone.
Oh, they master it, do they? So, you'd let a child who's been riding a bike for a week or so ride with heavy traffic, right? They've mastered it, so there's nothing else for them to learn.
You should have watched this video: https://youtu.be/sEON08d76oE?t=112 it nicely explains the importance of things like tram rails, and keeping a potato in your pants.
That was 40 year old me a couple years ago. Street car rails are terrible, bad for bikes and pedestrians, a lot of expense, and doesn't provide much more than a bus.
Dumbest comment I've read in a while here. Most Americans can't seem to "master" bike riding and so they all need to wear helmets. The Dutch don't and aren't the world capital of TBIs.
Dumbest comment I've read in a while here. (high five, it works both ways).
The Dutch have a bicycle culture and bicycle friendly streets where cars are outnumbered and don't despise cyclists in the manner of Sydney, Australia or Mean City, USA.
The Dutch also live in a flat country and don't extreme cycle down the side of Big Sur, etc either.
E-bikes are great for bike advocacy - what I’ve noticed is that a lot more people are biking because of them. I bump into lots more older people riding canyon roads than I used to, and people going grocery shopping or out to the pub on e-bikes. Friends who have been indoor people and not fit are buying e-bikes and getting out. This has nothing but positive effects on local traffic laws and bike lanes, and local trails and bike paths. I don’t have an e-bike yet, but I will get one eventually, maybe when my interest in climbing wanes, or maybe sooner just to increase my range.
My over middle aged colleague got into and enjoying cycling again with an e bike.
And he gives no dammn if this is cheeting according to some condescending self righteous hole of excretion. Did not even hear about those poor people. He just likes to move more and that's it.
As a (former) regular bike commuter, it was hilarious how some "serious" cyclists would say things like that, and then talk about the best ways to stay fit over the winter because obviously you're not gonna ride your bike when it's -5F out, right? Rather undermined my perception of how hardcore they were.
Similarly entertaining, leaving work one day when a dude in Lycra on a $3000 racing bike blew past me with hardly a glance. ...And then looked completely flabbergasted when I caught up with him and said "Hi!" at a stoplight a few miles down the road, riding my mountain bike and still wearing slacks and a button-down from work. Like, I may be a fatass, but I've been doing this every day for 15 years and my calves are solid rock.
Yes I saw the same thing countless times in London, lycra heroes on expensive bikes whizzing past me on the flat then I'd overtake them again on the way up the next hill! Happened particularly often in January after everyone had got their posh new bikes.
"Ride as much or as little, or as long or as short as you feel. But ride." - Eddy Merckx
I was a very casual and just enjoyed riding until I started getting into touring. You're right not to care, at all. Unless you are a professional or are riding competitively at high levels, you will always do better by losing a little bit of belly, focusing on technique, and having more miles on the road. Weight will not be the difference maker.
I would come back from a tour on my steel Surly and just whip by people with 7k+ bikes in Central Park on a regular basis. It was the miles and nothing else.
Rolling resistance and comfort matter. I never went less than 23mm and I wouldn't even do that today, I'd go far wider 28mm or 35mm. Being comfortable keeps you on your bike longer and the longer you're on your bike, the more fit you'll be and happy - since you're riding a bike for longer.
You don't care about "weight in grams" for each part.
You can get good exercise by lowering the assist level. You can raise the assist level for tricky parts or to get back to the car.
But the best part is getting TWO electric bikes - it lets you take someone with you, optimize for fun and minimize things like different ability or fitness levels.
Buying two bikes to have a spare for a friend doesn't really work, unless all your friends are close to your height. If you're tall, you can't ride really short-frame bikes, and your short friends can't ride yours. Bikes aren't one-size-fits all. And depending on the bike, there's only so much adjustability.
Ok, so you have one short friend and one tall friend. Now you're going to buy 3 bikes so you can have everyone covered? What happens when you get a new friend that doesn't fit your existing bikes?
Then, in that specific instance, I might hesitate to buy a spare vs purchasing a gift for a friend.
Trying to legislate simple statements as if they needed to be universal law, and judging them as failures because you failed to find a a way to do that, does not make the simple statement bad.
In this case, it does, because people vary wildly in heights and bikes aren't easily adjustable to wildly differing heights. The statement was given as advice, and it's bad advice. There are certain types of bikes engineered to be highly adjustable (think bike-share bikes) for different rider sizes, but these aren't the norm for privately-owned bikes.
eMTBs are thousands of dollars a piece. The idea of buying an extra just for friends to ride as general advice is very silly, even ignoring the problems with differing sizes. It's terrible general advice. In the specific situation where you have a lot of disposable income and a very specific friend in mind, sure, sounds fun.
By all means, avoid the gear rathole. But you should go deep enough to find a bike that feels good to ride and fits your body.
I tried to be a hardtail purist, and quit mountain biking because it just sucked. (Local terrain is all huge rocks and drops) Years later tried a full suspension carbon- whoa, mountain biking can be type I fun??
I tried to be a commuter purist, favoring simplicity, durability, and reliability. Riding my hybrid is un-gratifying and soul-sucking. Tried a racy road bike, awkward as hell. Tried a nice gravel bike, oh my god I don't want to stop pedaling!
It's worth spending a little more to get the bike that feels good for you to ride.
You can read all the articles you want, but eventually you'll have to take the bike for a test ride, and you'll realize that you have no idea how anything you read translates to how the bike feels to you. You don't have the context to interpret all that information until your physical abilities and skills have outgrown a bicycle at least once. Get what fits your budget, your body, and the type of riding you'll do.
Mass matters for the simple reason that if you need to climb a hill, the energy required to lift a mass is proportional to the mass. Granted, barring extremely heavy bikes, ~3/4 of the mass is the rider.
Not sure why this is downvoted. A normal bike shouldn’t weigh more than 15 kg (some weigh just half of that), so a human at 75% would only weigh 45 kg at most. Maybe people are thinking of e-bikes, which are a lot heavier.
Fair enough, but for a human, let's say weighing 70 kg, to be 75% of the total weight, the bike plus whatever is attached to it would have to be above 23 kg. You only reach such a ratio with extra luggage.
Also you reclaim the energy on the downhill. Mass doesn't matter as much as people used to think. (Hence no modern bikes being made out of drillium.)
The one thing where I suspect mass might matter is in the wheels. It's a huge difference between getting a heavy wheel spinning and a light one, and at least for commuting/recreational usage, most of that will be bled off as heat anyway.
Not really. Bikes don't have a battery to store reclaimed energy, if that would even be a thing. Maybe you go a bit faster on the downhill; I wouldn't call that reclaiming energy.
> Mass doesn't matter as much as people used to think.
On a flat road at a constant speed, mass doesn't matter (except for the slightly increased rolling resistance). With speed changes (in situations with sharp corners for example, or if you want to accelerate fast to escape from the bunch or to catch someone else) or in hilly/mountainous areas, mass does matter.
For recreational use, spending lots of money for shaving of a few grams here and there is not worth the effort, that's true. But a few kilograms more or less do make a difference.
> Hence no modern bikes being made out of drillium.
Modern top-of-the-line road bikes for climbing are already as light as allowed by the UCI. It makes no sense to drill holes in such a bike: you wouldn't be allowed to use it in a race.
An unstated assumption in my comment was that situations where light weight is most desirable are always UCI-sanctioned events. I admit that that view is probably too narrow.
Unless there is a stop sign, traffic signal, or sharp curve at the bottom before you've gotten to spend all that energy you worked so hard to build up. It's just not a guarantee that you can go full tilt down the gigantic hill you just climbed.
That isn’t how physics works - you have to spend energy to counteract that kinetic energy you’ve ineluctably released by going downhill.
This sort of edge case maximalism feels useless and needlessly contrarian - it seems as though if I were to claim you can pay for things by credit card, you’d claim “that doesn’t work what if the power is out”.
What are you on about? I do hilly rides all the time and personally feel the pain of not being able to reap the benefits of the climb _all the time_. Let's say I climb a big hill and there's a red light at the bottom of the other side. Guess where all my precious kinetic energy goes? It dissipates as sound and heat into my brake pads. Whoops! I ride about 60 miles a week on very hilly terrain. Off the top of my head, I can think of 3 very large hills that end in a stop sign at the bottom in the first 20 minutes of my regular ride! I actually can't think of a single hill where I'm totally free and clear going down the other side.
In my experience, hilly rides are just harder and I'm more tired after them. It's actually very surprising that what I would expect to be a common sense viewpoint is being considered the contrarian one! Sure, apply elementary physics and hills are meaningless, but apply real-world physics and maybe they aren't so meaningless. And we aren't even considering the differences in energy efficiency when your body has to work harder, or the major differences in energy loss through air drag at high speeds. There are also concerns about how comfortably and efficiently you are able to convert muscle energy into motion through pedaling (similar to how speed-walking gaits are very inefficient) at both the high (downhill) and low ends (uphill) of pedal RPM.
This. When I used to ride (80s and 90s), a lot of people would try to shave weight and you saw some crazy stuff to get the bike down to 13-15 pounds. Bikes would be dangerously fragile because people would drill stuff and make wheels with fewer and fewer spokes. 17-19 lbs was really where the balance was between safe and light... and having equipment fail cost you a race really sucked... and people were getting hurt.
What does this mean? A downhill gives your legs a rest if you coast but it's not going to restore all the energy you burned going up the hill. And if you're riding sportily (not even a race necessarily), you'll still be pedaling the same amount of watts downhill. You'll just be going faster for the same amount of muscle power.
> Mass doesn't matter as much as people used to think. (Hence no modern bikes being made out of drillium.)
Modern bikes are getting lighter and lighter.
> The one thing where I suspect mass might matter is in the wheels.
Yes, in terms of ROI by unit weight, lighter wheels are the best place to start.
The trend over the last few years have been disk brakes, aerodynamic features and wider tires, all of which come with a weight penalty. Some brands are now starting to converge their aero and lightweight offerings, though.
You reclaim it downhill if you book it. Casual riders seem to brake after reaching a certain speed, so they will send that energy to heat the brakes. Plus, the unfun of getting up the hill is probably more important than the fun going down, as it takes longer :)
On the other hand, a heavy wheel will also hold more angular momentum and so will better resist drag, at the cost of more difficult acceleration, braking, and stiffer but more stable steering.
A heavier wheel, just like a heavier bike in general, doesn't "better resist drag". Yes, it makes the bike slow down slower, just as it makes it harder to speed up the bike.
When people say heavier bikes and/or wheels "resist drag better", it sounds like all that extra mass somehow magically makes it so that you need less power on the pedals to maintain speed. That is simply wrong.
No, it's not wrong. Given the same cross-section and initial speed, a heavier object moving through a fluid over a certain time will decelerate less than a lighter object, and so will require less energy to bring it up to the speed it had before decelerating, because the difference in speed will be less. For the same reason, you would not ride while dragging an open umbrella behind yourself, but you'd have no problem putting a metal cube of the same mass on your stem. It's the ratio of cross-section and mass.
> a heavier object moving through a fluid over a certain time will decelerate less than a lighter object
True
> and so will require less energy to bring it up to the speed it had before decelerating, because the difference in speed will be less
False
The higher inertia of the heavier object resisted the deceleration, and that same higher inertia will resist acceleration too in exactly the same way. You've gained nothing at all.
> For the same reason, you would not ride while dragging an open umbrella behind yourself, but you'd have no problem putting a metal cube of the same mass on your stem. It's the ratio of cross-section and mass.
Now you're talking about aerodynamics which is a whole different matter. For aerodynamics, cross-section is of course a major factor (not the ratio of cross-section and mass!). That's pretty obvious, but has nothing to do with a discussion about mass.
(Ratio of cross-section and mass is relevant for things in free fall, because there gravity is the relevant force. Completely different from a vehicle on a flat road.)
Drag will exert a constant force regardless of mass. So heavier wheels may allow you to coast farther, but at constant speed they don't affect the drag component.
I didn't say greater mass changes drag, I said it resists drag better. As you say, the force remains constant, so with constant force and greater mass, acceleration gets a lesser absolute value.
Distance is a funny thing. I've done multi-day hundreds of mile charity rides for fun. I've trained and helped train people who would not think of doing such to do so. I've also done 20+ mile mountain bike rides on a single speed mountain bike. These days, I like to just get out and explore with no time or distance goals. Some of it is for exercise, some of it is for clearing my mind and having fun.
My recommendation for those getting into it, decide the type of riding you wnat to do, figure out a budget and try bikes (new and used) in that budget for the one you like.
For what it's worth, my main bike is a steel "gravel bike" with fairly beefy tires, disk breaks and no suspension. I take it most places I have taken my full suspension mountain bike when riding in the bay area.
I ride daily, to commute and workout and just for joy on a Sunday. In a city.
I've never considered anything but a steel frame (most common), in the realm of $1000 or less fully built.
Sure, I desire more. But we're talking about 10% satisfaction improvement for my (our) needs.
And I definitely will splurge on a new bike soon, but only because I have money to burn.
I am contemplating a $3-500ish fitting with all the latest tech and a trained expert. That feels honestly worth it for anyone because it will likely save you injury.
The funny thing is you can go really expensive with steel as well. If you're at the $1000 price point you're probably not using really good brakes or wheels; both can vastly improve your ride and enjoyment.
I agree. There's always more to pay. But I've never thought to myself "geez my brakes aren't enough". Disc brakes are too powerful IMO, and thus dangerous. And honestly I don't even know what difference wheels would make? Mine are circular, stay true. Why do folks pay thousands on hand built wheels?
Gears/derailleurs I have a tough time with.. even nice ones seem to need constant adjustment so I ride a single speed now and feel like I discovered a bike secret.
I'd spend on fit, frame, seat, tires as a min bar to be picky about.
> Disc brakes are too powerful IMO, and thus dangerous.
Not true at all. People learn to modulate instinctively in a matter of seconds when switching from different bikes/brake systems.
Besides deoending on pad compound and rim material many v-brakes are very brutal with a low curve between doing nothing and grabbing hard compared to cantilevers and road calipers, so it not only about disc vs rim brake systems.
Try to get a bike fit first. Ideally after some basic stretchwork / few classes of mobility training just to get the feel of what Your body is capable of in the short term.
It sounds like waste of money for something people feel like they should be able to judge themselves, but bikes aren't shoes. The issues often develop only after some hours of effort. If You're a beginner, chances are the flexibility of Your back / hips / joints will be the most limiting factor.
Buying a racing bike, which a lot of people do, is as silly as buying GS racing skis, which hardly anyone does for recreational skiing because it's a Bad Idea. You won't like it unless you are as fit as a racer. Even then you won't find either the bike or skis pleasant for any purpose other than training to race.
Elite athletes are a different species from you and me.
That's absolutely not true. Commuting on a nice road bike is awesome. There's a trade off curve in regards to weight so it's really not necessary to spend 5 digits for the casual rider of course.
> That's absolutely not true. Commuting on a nice road bike is awesome.
OP said racing bike not road bike. I agree commuting on a nice road bike is awesome and the comfort/endurace category of road bikes is great for that (e.g. Specialized Roubaix, Trek Domane, etc.)
I wouldn't want to commute on an all-out race bike though. Too stiff, too uncomfortable geometry.
It depends on the road, of ones flexibility more than the actual power level.
I used to ride as an elite racer 20y ago, I don't ride much these days, only twice a week and mostly shorts sub 3h, rides. My power is not higher than the average dude on the bike riding several times a week. Yet I am still comfy on a racing bike because I didn't lost that flexibility. I actually feel worse when my handlebar is too high and I can't stretch my back horizontally. I uusally don't fit well on what they call endurance bikes.
There are road bikes for fitness rides and touring, and there are racing geometry road bikes. Most people are better off with an endurance geometry road bike or a gravel bike.
My point is that more people buy racing equipment for cycling than do skiers for skiing. It is more obvious that a straight sidecut on a long stiff ski won't be fun, than it is that a low stack height and high seat will hurt your neck. You'll see a loot of kludges to fix these decisions: adjustable stems, steering tube extenders, etc.
Nah. It's not about how fit you are, it's about what type of riding you enjoy. A road bike lets you go faster, but also makes you push yourself more that you otherwise would, because of the geometry and posture. If you prefer to have relaxing rides you're not going to enjoy road bikes, because they're just not built to facilitate them.
As another commenter said, bike fit is very important, especially to mitigate overuse injuries (don't be like me!). Beyond that I have found my $400 mish-mash of mid-2000s mid-range road parts attached to a $90 aluminum Nashbar frame to be sufficient for my road cycling needs.
Also need to stop talking to other cyclists online. "Oh yeah 100 miles is easy", not for me it isn't.