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One thing I noticed after cycling across North America on a $500 hybrid and then Colombia on a $200 utility bike was that there is a wildly different class of c

One thing I noticed after cycling across North America on a $500 hybrid and then Colombia on a $200 utility bike was that there is a wildly different class of cyclist that rides with computers and carbon fiber and shiny jerseys... They were as baffled by my setup as I was by theirs. It's almost an entirely different category of transportation. Or perhaps it isn't so much a form of transportation for them, it's a hobby - they often drive their bikes to the place they want to ride instead of just riding the in-between. I imagine there is room to cater to both types of cyclist. Perhaps it was a self-selecting group for me, but I found every mechanic I visited on the road to be most busy with repairs of low-tech gear. It seems to me that low-tech bikes will continue to make up the long tail for many years to come, even if catering to those customers is less lucrative.

ubermonkey 4y ago
Yeah, there's a difference between utility riders and hobby riders. You wouldn't be able to keep up on my Saturday rides on a hybrid unless you've got world-tour legs. The riding position and gearing are just not intended for go-fast go-far riding. You don't really even see many hybrids on large-scale charity rides, at least in the US. And yeah, quite often people do load up bikes to drive to a ride. I guess for transportation riders this sounds weird, but if you live in location A and the you want to do a group ride at location B that's 20 miles away (not unusual in a big urban area), then I'm not sure what else you'd do. I'm likely going to a ride out in the southwestern suburbs here in Houston on Saturday, for example. The start is 23 miles from my house, and there's not a great cycling-friendly way to get there, so I'll load up and drive. I do share your concern about long-term use. We're far enough into the electronic shifting era that early systems are falling out of the support window. Shimano's earliest Di2 systems were only 10-speed, for example; I imagine finding replacement rear derailleurs for that system is nearly impossible now, but OTOH lifespan of a rear derailleur is pretty long. The version of SRAM's eTap on my bike is 11-speed; it's been updated since, so new bikes come with a 12-speed version called AXS. I don't know if I could easily get a replacement derailleur for mine, but TBH I also wonder that about the mechanical Ultegra derailleur on my other road bike.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  I don't think my city is quite as hostile as houston but is in the same class. I'll ride 20 miles to the start of a ride pretty often, or sometimes take the bus if the route lines up. This is very common in urban fixed gear culture, but our rides tend to be small and ad-hoc compared to the big organized road bike ones. I've done those a few times and was actively made unwelcome so it's not particularly surprising it's not extremely on your radar. Nonetheless my city has an active community a couple thousand strong that would consider it unusual to drive to a ride.
  - ubermonkey 4y ago
    >I'll ride 20 miles to the start of a ride pretty often Given that weekend road rides here often start at 0700, I'm absolutely not gonna do that. ;) And don't get me wrong; Houston isn't nearly as hostile to cycling as it was 20 years ago. We just made the top 50 cities for bike-ability (#29!), which is recognition of the improvements we've been slowly making -- protected surface lanes are part of that, but the BIGGEST part is the large-and-growing system of trails along the bayous, some of which mesh in with rails-to-trails initiatives. You can ride for hours on these trails with only minimal interaction with conventional streets, and they're laid in ways that make commutes viable for lots of people. https://abc13.com/houston-biking-bike-friendly-city-bikeability-ranking-cycling/11919267/ https://abc13.com/houston-biking-bike-friendly-city-bikeabil...
- petre 4y ago
  Heh, I got an all road bike mostly because of the annoying headwind and the fixed hand positions on the hybrid. You can usually find older mechanical parts on ebay or even NOS or just use a newer Ultegra or 105 if it's still 11 speed. I'm still on mechanical parts, the all road bike is on 10 speed GRX. Mostly never drive to ride, only if I have to ride more than 50 km away and the route is bike hostile. People drive their mountain bikes to the trailhead in my area though. I also never race. What I sometimes do is randomly pick some roadies and try to keep up with them. What actually happens is ending up keeping up with some girl on a nondescript hybrid who has dropped the roadies.
MezzoDelCammin 4y ago
I don't think it's as binary as You make it out to be. Just look into the ultra distance / bikepacking community. It's pretty varied when it comes to both frames and groupsets. Specially once You get into some more extreme events (e.g. Tour Divide for MTB or TransContinental for more of a road stuff, but the scene is growing pretty fast these past few years). Personally, I'm on a 2018 steel Kona Rove (~1200Eur bike back in 2018) that I'm currently upgrading to an electronic groupset with hydro brakes. Reason for that is simple hand fatique / "cyclist's palsy" over long distances. I also have a head unit, simply because of the GPS track that I usually try to follow. Gearing info is a bonus, but knowing the state of battery is pretty useful.
- alisonatwork 4y ago
  I think the kinds of people who are in a "community" is exactly the kinds of people who I would classify more as hobbyist riders. I encountered a lot of them along my travels, because I would follow random rail trails and relatively easy singletrack, then I'd meet these guys who were using a GPS and ultralight camping equipment and tires twice as fat as mine. They were amazed I could even get on the same trail they were on without any special gear in particular. No doubt, they probably traveled twice as far as I would in a day, they perhaps never got off to push up the very steep sections, and I'm sure they never had to backtrack like I did, but eh. For me I was happier to have spent around $1000 on my entire setup (including tent and sleep system) because it left enough money over that I could keep traveling for months. It's just a different way of looking at your bicycle. With regard to the "cyclist's palsy", that was the injury that surprised me most - I was expecting to get sore legs, not hands! I found a pair of gel gloves helped a lot for cycling on terrain where I needed to keep my hands on the handlebars, but whenever I was on a flatter surface I just changed my position to lean on the bars with my elbows. Same thing when I got a bad neck crick, I just rested up for a day or two and then changed my riding position. I'm sure a better or more personally-adjusted bike would've been way more comfortable, but it wasn't impossible to ride long distances without it. I think a lot of the specialized equipment is more about optimizing away inconveniences, which is great, but it's not really necessary outside of a race or "keeping up with the group" situation. If you want to tour solo, it's perfectly possible to just make do with whatever junk bike you have access to and adapt your route and behavior to the tools you have. I think when you start spending significant amounts of cash money on optimizing away the inconveniences, that's when you have entered a different class of cyclist. When you go to bike stores it often seems like all the cyclists are of that class, because all of the equipment for sale seems to be geared to them. But in the mechanic shops, I personally found it to be more balanced in the other direction. I guess there is a really large group of people who never go to a bike store and just buy department store bikes or reliable and easily-maintainable second-hand gear that the hobbyists have moved on from.
npteljes 4y ago
Not Just Bikes touches on this in a video of his - how he's not a "cyclist", despite riding his bike a lot, and how the majority of his fellows in the Netherslands aren't cyclists either. He explained that they use two different words for the two groups, "fietser" for the everyday cyclers, and "wielrenner" for those who do it for sport or enthusiasm.
- black_puppydog 4y ago
  Yeah reading some of your sibling replies also made me think of Not Just Bikes. But rather the "Why Dutch Bikes are Better (and why you should want one)" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aESqrP3hfi8&t=488s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aESqrP3hfi8&t=488s Note the timestamp. :P This was literally the only time I had heard the word "hybrid" when discussing bikes. And it's not like I'm a stranger to bikes; I've done virtually all possible repairs one can do on a fully mechanical one at some point.
asdff 4y ago
As a fellow <$500 cyclist I love these spandex cyclists, they move to the next shiny thing and unload their hardly outdated gear for way under retail just to get rid of it. Before the pandemic and all the inflated prices I was able to snag a beauty dura ace roadie from a guy who was moving in on the gravel bike craze for a few hundred dollars. If I parted out the components alone on that bike I'd be in the money, not including the frame.
usrusr 4y ago
Perhaps I misunderstood, but how can cycling across North America be just transportation and not a hobby? Would you have used, say, a car instead if you had one? There are many shades of bike nerd, but in my eyes those demonstratively rejecting the tech side don't qualify any less. Take Sheldon Brown for example, he sure would have nerded with the best of them, and tech-rejected with the best of those as well.
- alisonatwork 4y ago
  I wanted to go on holiday to places I had never visited before, and places where public transport does not go, so I just got on my bike and went there. I don't own a car, but even if I did I don't think it would have been able to take me to all of the places a bike did. Still, at the core my hobby is traveling, not cycling.
  - usrusr 4y ago
    Best possible reply, no doubt about that.
btreesOfSpring 4y ago
I'm pretty sure the top five finishers in last year's Trans Am Bike Race were all running Di2. The elites in the ultra-endurance self-support races are probably the hybrid rider type of the two groups of cyclists you are talking about here.

ubermonkey 4y ago

Yeah, there's a difference between utility riders and hobby riders. You wouldn't be able to keep up on my Saturday rides on a hybrid unless you've got world-tour legs. The riding position and gearing are just not intended for go-fast go-far riding. You don't really even see many hybrids on large-scale charity rides, at least in the US. And yeah, quite often people do load up bikes to drive to a ride. I guess for transportation riders this sounds weird, but if you live in location A and the you want to do a group ride at location B that's 20 miles away (not unusual in a big urban area), then I'm not sure what else you'd do. I'm likely going to a ride out in the southwestern suburbs here in Houston on Saturday, for example. The start is 23 miles from my house, and there's not a great cycling-friendly way to get there, so I'll load up and drive. I do share your concern about long-term use. We're far enough into the electronic shifting era that early systems are falling out of the support window. Shimano's earliest Di2 systems were only 10-speed, for example; I imagine finding replacement rear derailleurs for that system is nearly impossible now, but OTOH lifespan of a rear derailleur is pretty long. The version of SRAM's eTap on my bike is 11-speed; it's been updated since, so new bikes come with a 12-speed version called AXS. I don't know if I could easily get a replacement derailleur for mine, but TBH I also wonder that about the mechanical Ultegra derailleur on my other road bike.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
I don't think my city is quite as hostile as houston but is in the same class. I'll ride 20 miles to the start of a ride pretty often, or sometimes take the bus if the route lines up. This is very common in urban fixed gear culture, but our rides tend to be small and ad-hoc compared to the big organized road bike ones. I've done those a few times and was actively made unwelcome so it's not particularly surprising it's not extremely on your radar. Nonetheless my city has an active community a couple thousand strong that would consider it unusual to drive to a ride.
- ubermonkey 4y ago
  >I'll ride 20 miles to the start of a ride pretty often Given that weekend road rides here often start at 0700, I'm absolutely not gonna do that. ;) And don't get me wrong; Houston isn't nearly as hostile to cycling as it was 20 years ago. We just made the top 50 cities for bike-ability (#29!), which is recognition of the improvements we've been slowly making -- protected surface lanes are part of that, but the BIGGEST part is the large-and-growing system of trails along the bayous, some of which mesh in with rails-to-trails initiatives. You can ride for hours on these trails with only minimal interaction with conventional streets, and they're laid in ways that make commutes viable for lots of people. https://abc13.com/houston-biking-bike-friendly-city-bikeability-ranking-cycling/11919267/ https://abc13.com/houston-biking-bike-friendly-city-bikeabil...
petre 4y ago
Heh, I got an all road bike mostly because of the annoying headwind and the fixed hand positions on the hybrid. You can usually find older mechanical parts on ebay or even NOS or just use a newer Ultegra or 105 if it's still 11 speed. I'm still on mechanical parts, the all road bike is on 10 speed GRX. Mostly never drive to ride, only if I have to ride more than 50 km away and the route is bike hostile. People drive their mountain bikes to the trailhead in my area though. I also never race. What I sometimes do is randomly pick some roadies and try to keep up with them. What actually happens is ending up keeping up with some girl on a nondescript hybrid who has dropped the roadies.

MezzoDelCammin 4y ago

I don't think it's as binary as You make it out to be. Just look into the ultra distance / bikepacking community. It's pretty varied when it comes to both frames and groupsets. Specially once You get into some more extreme events (e.g. Tour Divide for MTB or TransContinental for more of a road stuff, but the scene is growing pretty fast these past few years). Personally, I'm on a 2018 steel Kona Rove (~1200Eur bike back in 2018) that I'm currently upgrading to an electronic groupset with hydro brakes. Reason for that is simple hand fatique / "cyclist's palsy" over long distances. I also have a head unit, simply because of the GPS track that I usually try to follow. Gearing info is a bonus, but knowing the state of battery is pretty useful.

alisonatwork 4y ago
I think the kinds of people who are in a "community" is exactly the kinds of people who I would classify more as hobbyist riders. I encountered a lot of them along my travels, because I would follow random rail trails and relatively easy singletrack, then I'd meet these guys who were using a GPS and ultralight camping equipment and tires twice as fat as mine. They were amazed I could even get on the same trail they were on without any special gear in particular. No doubt, they probably traveled twice as far as I would in a day, they perhaps never got off to push up the very steep sections, and I'm sure they never had to backtrack like I did, but eh. For me I was happier to have spent around $1000 on my entire setup (including tent and sleep system) because it left enough money over that I could keep traveling for months. It's just a different way of looking at your bicycle. With regard to the "cyclist's palsy", that was the injury that surprised me most - I was expecting to get sore legs, not hands! I found a pair of gel gloves helped a lot for cycling on terrain where I needed to keep my hands on the handlebars, but whenever I was on a flatter surface I just changed my position to lean on the bars with my elbows. Same thing when I got a bad neck crick, I just rested up for a day or two and then changed my riding position. I'm sure a better or more personally-adjusted bike would've been way more comfortable, but it wasn't impossible to ride long distances without it. I think a lot of the specialized equipment is more about optimizing away inconveniences, which is great, but it's not really necessary outside of a race or "keeping up with the group" situation. If you want to tour solo, it's perfectly possible to just make do with whatever junk bike you have access to and adapt your route and behavior to the tools you have. I think when you start spending significant amounts of cash money on optimizing away the inconveniences, that's when you have entered a different class of cyclist. When you go to bike stores it often seems like all the cyclists are of that class, because all of the equipment for sale seems to be geared to them. But in the mechanic shops, I personally found it to be more balanced in the other direction. I guess there is a really large group of people who never go to a bike store and just buy department store bikes or reliable and easily-maintainable second-hand gear that the hobbyists have moved on from.

npteljes 4y ago

Not Just Bikes touches on this in a video of his - how he's not a "cyclist", despite riding his bike a lot, and how the majority of his fellows in the Netherslands aren't cyclists either. He explained that they use two different words for the two groups, "fietser" for the everyday cyclers, and "wielrenner" for those who do it for sport or enthusiasm.

black_puppydog 4y ago
Yeah reading some of your sibling replies also made me think of Not Just Bikes. But rather the "Why Dutch Bikes are Better (and why you should want one)" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aESqrP3hfi8&t=488s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aESqrP3hfi8&t=488s Note the timestamp. :P This was literally the only time I had heard the word "hybrid" when discussing bikes. And it's not like I'm a stranger to bikes; I've done virtually all possible repairs one can do on a fully mechanical one at some point.

asdff 4y ago

As a fellow <$500 cyclist I love these spandex cyclists, they move to the next shiny thing and unload their hardly outdated gear for way under retail just to get rid of it. Before the pandemic and all the inflated prices I was able to snag a beauty dura ace roadie from a guy who was moving in on the gravel bike craze for a few hundred dollars. If I parted out the components alone on that bike I'd be in the money, not including the frame.

usrusr 4y ago

Perhaps I misunderstood, but how can cycling across North America be just transportation and not a hobby? Would you have used, say, a car instead if you had one? There are many shades of bike nerd, but in my eyes those demonstratively rejecting the tech side don't qualify any less. Take Sheldon Brown for example, he sure would have nerded with the best of them, and tech-rejected with the best of those as well.

alisonatwork 4y ago
I wanted to go on holiday to places I had never visited before, and places where public transport does not go, so I just got on my bike and went there. I don't own a car, but even if I did I don't think it would have been able to take me to all of the places a bike did. Still, at the core my hobby is traveling, not cycling.
- usrusr 4y ago
  Best possible reply, no doubt about that.

btreesOfSpring 4y ago

I'm pretty sure the top five finishers in last year's Trans Am Bike Race were all running Di2. The elites in the ultra-endurance self-support races are probably the hybrid rider type of the two groups of cyclists you are talking about here.