Originally Posted by
medic75
But, as you already stated, urban bikes don’t have drop bars. So you don’t have all the stuff. Just imagine the possibilities. Obviously, the bars would need to be a bit wider. There are manufacturers who have been making drop extenders for quite a while. The down side to those is the fact that you can’t quickly access the brakes. All-road bikes have solved that problem.
I will agree that the line between bike categories has been blurred lately. What really matters is if the bike will serve the intended purpose. IMHO, many of these mash up bikes are not great for any one purpose, but they are great at being good at several purposes.
I guess I'm confused here because my previous message was terse.
I don't understand what problem has been solved.
Most bikes in Europe have the option of hydro/cable discs, racks, fenders, dynamos / LEDs, thin/thick, 622/559 wheel sets and drop/flats as changeable combos drops can be installed on any bike ... so what's the revolution here?
I ride in very heavily urban area now (the population dense in the UK and in the entire EU it seems and 5x more dense than London it seems) and ditched the drops as the fractions of a second spend looking down caused issues with visibility with doors opening/closing and such. Also, in a heavily urban environment, drops are useless because you're always starting/stopping whereas flats/risers make more sense when mixing with traffic and the low bits of the bars weren't getting any use. If I want that style, bullhorns seem a much better option with a bar-end shifter.
Average space per inhabitant in selected metropolitan regions, 2013 (mē per inhabitant)
URL:
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statis...lation_density