My wife just donated my old drop bar bike (a low end 70s bike boom road bike). I always rather liked the drop bar on it. I was riding it still this summer. With drops nice to get out of a headwind somewhat. And as an out of shape guy in his 60s I found them comfy still. Drop bars balanced my weight on the bike well.

Another benefit was the four positions I used on them. I've never been a long distance tourer (20 miles a day is about as much as I ride, and it's often less than half that) but I don't have strong arms, much core strength, and I have an heavy upper body now, so I like to mix up my hand positions.

I replaced it this summer with a touring bike that came with a trekking bar, seeking comfort when riding mostly. I now have about 250 miles on it, and I'm so far finding the comfort I sought. Of course the new bike has fat tires and relaxed angles which also contribute to that comfort. There are five useful positions on the trekking bars. maybe a sixth if I was brave enough to lay my forearms down on them like aero bars.

I still don't know that the trekking bars themselves are more comfortable than drop bars, but they seem at least comparable.

However, since this is the hybrid sub-forum, tonight I've just swapped a set of trekking bars for the straight bar on my Trek 7.2FX. Frankly I hated the straight bar on the 7.2FX. Too straight, even just a little sweep back would have helped my wrists. And no real position options either. Changing out the grips to Ergon grips with the little bar ends helped a little, but the bar ends were way spread out, and they helped only a little on the wrist discomfort.

The swap to the trekking bar took less than 15 minutes. You take the brakes and trigger shifters off and move them right over. My Trek has an adjustable angle stem, but I didn't adjust it yet. For a further experiment, I tried this set of trekking bars with more of a vertical orientation than the closer to horizontal level of the set up on my touring bike. This makes the inner, braking position more of a drop out of the wind and makes the top front position like an upright comfort bike riser bar. I didn't have much time so I took it out with the bar bare and without any tape or grips for a 9 mile round trip.

Even without grips, a definite comfort improvement. I'll play around more with the angle of the bar and maybe the stem too as I figure out how this works on this bike. On the ride out there was a modest headwind, so down in the lower position for most of it. Was maybe just a tad short top tube and stem wise--not way off, but something I might tweak. On the way back there's a block-long hill, so I tried standing and grabbing the top 3/4 position for good leverage (like standing while grabbing the hoods of a drop bar setup). Works great.

Speaking in the context of the hybrid forum, this is a very easy and inexpensive conversion (the bars I got were the Nashbar model, less than $20). Others have already talked about the costs and number of parts you'd need to swap out for a drop bar conversion on hybrid. Comfort and efficiency-wise it a big pickup over a straight bar. I didn't find the Nashbar bar particularly heavy. I'm sure I gained a few grams, so I only half filled my water bottle to compensate (grin).