I will be interested to see just how disk-brakes find themselves distributed throughout the bike market over the next few years. Disks probably will be seen with greater regularity on commuting bikes, but I’m not sure that they’re going to come to dominate on the road in anything like they way they now do on mountain bikes.


The reason has to do with the move that disks have made from mountain biking to other segments. Disks came out on mountain bikes when they did precisely because the deficiencies of then-existing brakes were clear and urgent to mountain bikers. Road cycling, including commuting, has been going on a much longer time than mountain biking and there has never been any similarly great impetus toward disk brakes. Indeed, here we are in 2012 and only now are we being told that road bikes will adopt this technology in significant numbers.

The most natural explanation for these two timelines is that there just isn’t as much background demand for disk brakes on road bikes. This could be for a variety of reasons: weight, aerodynamics, cost, or something else. Whatever the explanation of the fact of differing background demand, it is clear there is this fact. If things were otherwise, we should have expected disk brakes to appear on road bikes much earlier than now—there’s no particular reason that the changes now being contemplated to road bikes to accommodate disks could not have been made a decade ago.

UCI approval isn’t a convincing story, either, on this head, as people just would have flocked to disk brakes because they were so useful, if in fact they were, with or without UCI approval. Lots of people have sub-UCI weight bikes around the clubs, after all. (Indeed, mountain bikes themselves emerged as a consumer preference first and then a race standard later.)

Consumer biking is a good test, anyway, of present background demand for disk brakes in one use since commuters care nothing for UCI standards. These forums record that a fair number of commuters want disks. On the other hand, a lot of the bike market does not post here.


I have my own preference on my commuting rig for rim brakes, but this is just one person talking and I don’t have time or willingness to elaborate on that now. To those who want disk brakes, buy them and use them. More power to you.