Originally Posted by
TheLizard
Nah, I just don't like them. And it's hard to find a bike like I want to ride that doesn't have the drop bars. I like gravel bikes because I'm always riding on mixed terrain (asphalt, broken, poorly maintained asphalt, and crushed gravel mostly). Most gravel bikes around here have the drop bars, which I hate.
When I decided I didn't want to ride that bike any more because of the drop bars, I sold it cheap. I'm sure the guy that bought it wouldn't have considered a bike with a flat bar. Cheap worked. I sold it less than 3 hours after I posted it for sale.
You can ride other types of bikes on gravel and poor roads. A "Gravel Bike" is a road bike adjusted a little bit to have a more relaxed headtube etc. and the ability to take wider tyres. So it's no wonder you can't find many without drop bars: They are just a more rugged version of a road bike.
Look at other bikes and just choose the tyres correctly, and voila; You will have a bike that can do gravel. It can be a longish MTB, a "trekking" bike, a mixte, or whatever else.
In other words: It is called a "
gravel bike" as opposed to the "
road bike" it is derived from. However, those bikes aren't the only ones that can ride perfectly well on gravel. It's for a particular type of gravel riding and for a particular type of rider.