Originally Posted by PaulH
That means that there are no "granny gears" for spinning up really steep hills. That might be an issue in San Francisco, but not here in the DC area.
You can still change the gearing on a Nexus,just swap the chainrings.
And which part of DC do you live in? Obviously not NW. Plenty of hills around Cathedral. The two routes I commute into work are almost all hills;maybe 10% of each is flat ground.