Originally Posted by
Spoonrobot
A couple months down the line and I've been thinking. Most of the guys I've been gravel riding with the past 3-5 years are either on the same original gravel bike they got, or they're doing something else. I've rarely talked to another rider that has more than one gravel bike - it doesn't seem to be like road where guys'll get 2-3-4 slightly different road bikes. They buy one gravel bike and that's it. The fast changing specs don't seem to be enticing new purchases either. Seems there's not a lot of churn outside of new customers. I see these sorts of new customers too and by and large they're buying more than gravel, less than MTB bikes. Two recent releases seem to really be backing the ascendant bikepacking bike theory earlier in this thread. Ostensibly a road bike, the new VO Passhunter disc is built like a burly mountain/gravel/bikepacking bike with the frame warts and all:
...
Yikes. Evolution or devolution? Then there's the 2020 Marin Pine Mountain, a great mountain bike infected with bikepacking disease, apparently.
So:
- Regular bikes with additional bikepacking features
- E-Bikes
- Doing something else (attendance for majority of events here in/around Atlanta is down)
Seems to be the near-term future.
How many dirt roads are there in the Atlanta area though? It looks pretty sparse on Gravelmap.com. Does some of this relate to what a riders main interest is? As in; a road rider may have a collection of road bikes and a single MTB for when they feel like a change or a mountain biker may have a collection of MTB's and a single road bike. If riding gravel roads isn't your primary pursuit, then the gravel bike is the N+1 and why would you have multiple, very similar bikes for a type of riding that is a side interest?
I guess I've got four gravel bikes, though only one was sold as such. But, to me they are dirt road road bikes and it's the main riding I do because anything else means putting the bike in the car. You may have heard that Michigan isn't very good at paving things, most of the roads in my area are gravel/dirt/packed sand despite the area being fairly developed. Gravel riding here seems to be going strong because many of the gravel riders are the guys who would be roadies if there was pavement. I think lots of area in the midwest may be similar and gravel riding will stay strong here while it falls off in the areas with more population and more pavement.