Originally Posted by
Andy_K
Off road, this bike is a lot of fun to ride, even on something as lame as the grass and dirt under the power lines, but on pavement (as expected) it was brutal in comparison to my CX bike with slick tires. It made me wonder. I see mountain bikes with suspension and knobby tires at work fairly often. Do people really voluntarily work that hard?
My actual question: if you ride a bike like this to work, what kind of surfaces are you riding on most of the way?
I laugh when I see people riding mountain bikes on pavements. It is like the soccer mom who buys an SUV in the south where it never snows and they never drive off-road; burning up gas for nothing.
Mountain bikes by design are clunky cumbersome machines. Their fat tires and weighty suspension is a lot to drag around. Worse yet is the riding position. The rider is forced down so the upper body weight is forced down onto single position straight handle bars which almost surely cause hand numbness.
The wide bars are like riding and parking a Texas long-horn steer. They get tangled in everything, are difficult to squeeze into parking stands, and impossible to throw into the back of a hatch-back car for a quickie ride home.
In China, the mountain bike had some short-lived fashion days back in the early '90's, but the Chinese quickly recognized how silly the design was for street riding and nicknamed business commuters "Panda" because the whites of their shirts would poke out from under their dark suit jackets at the cuffs, waist, and collar.
Of course, some guys replace the wide mountain bike tires with narrower slicks and they change the handlebars. In other words, they do as much as possible to change the mountain bike to something besides a mountain bike.
I DO sometimes ride my mountain bike on the streets when it is snowing or icy, but besides that I don't use a spoon to do a knife job. In other words, I don't ride mountain bikes on paved roads.