Originally Posted by
tjspiel
You guys are all wrong ;-)
You're forgetting one crucial fact. Picture somebody in the market for a UO8 thiry years ago. Picture that same type of person buying a bike today. More likely than not they're going to get a hybrid or mountain bike, -not a road bike. The public perception of drop bar style road bikes is that they're for racing, -hence low end road bikes have a tighter geometry.
A person buying an OCR 3 might be somebody just getting into club riding or triathlons. People rarely buy road bikes for recreational purposes anymore.
Actually in my opinion they are a lot more bike options today than in the past but the idea that new bikes are more "stable" is questionable. Most probably brake more reliably than a steel wheeled UO8.
Excellent point! Don't you ever wonder why you keep coming across examples of your beloved '70s- or '80s-era steel road bikes in nearly pristine shape? I admit that back in those days I sold plenty of drop-bar bikes to casual riders. Some got ridden, most didn't. When mountain bikes came along, as some of you will remember, the road bike portion of the U.S. bike sales market shrank to less than 5% of the total. Some of the people buying those bikes were riding off road, most weren't: they just wanted something more comfortable than the steel road bikes that we all speak of with such reverence now.
And on the eternal steel-versus-aluminum debate: if there's a material-related difference in comfort, etc., for bike frames, where are the figures that correlate comfort with vertical frame deflection for a given bike geometry? Or are the differences too subtle to measure?
After 40 years of riding high-end bikes (steel, aluminum, road, criterium, track), I still can't say that I prefer steel to aluminum for ride comfort, whatever that means. I know the C & V people like to bond over this issue, but really: there's a good chance it's all in your heads.