The trouble with technology that advances too fast
 

This guy is clearly not anti-technology. He points out the pitfalls of change for change's sake.

Jeff's Bike Blog: Is technology your friend?

Interesting read. But I would point out that an 11 day unsupported bike packing race through the wilderness is probably not the set of conditions most users will have in mind. Those kinds of events present a whole slew of different considerations than your average roadie will have in mind.

I noticed that Ira Ryan also eschewed GPS and used paper maps for his Oregon outback win. That Breadwinner is a sweet ride, C&V or not.

i would use both paper maps and the phone's gps due to battery life and service interruption.

What a suitable theme for the Classic&Vintage sub-forum! The read was very engaging and I'm glad I found most of my feelings about technology today put into words. Thanks for sharing this!

+1, I was going to post the same thing, you beat me to it.

I did the Velodirt North Trask ride a few weeks ago using the ridewithgps.com map, both print and online version. Since parts of the ride were in cellular dead zones, I downloaded the map sections to a smartphone-GPS still works as long as there is line-of-site to the satellites. I knew that GPS navigation really wears out the battery, so I kept it off as long as I knew where i was. The amazing thing is that the turn-by-turn directions were dead on, even on dirt and gravel forestry roads. The problem was the phone started to die near the end of the ride. Luckily I was near the end, and was comfortable with the paper maps from then on, so I turned the phone off.

Technology can make things easier, but a good ol' map and compass is still the go-to backup system.

This is quite interesting. I work in technology, I write software, I run systems, I'm in the thick of it, living in a world of abstraction build on abstraction.

It gets tiring.


I love hopping on my '75 John Deere bike at the end of the day with it's friction shifters and simple everything -- nothing gets in the way of understanding what the machine is doing while you're at the controls.

I love getting in my '81 Pickup, knowing that the clutch pedal has a solid mechanical connection to the clutch, that the gas pedal yanks a wire, which opens the throttle plate with allows the engine to pull in more air, and with it the requisite amount of fuel, tuning the radio with a knob and needing to retune every-so-often as the signal strength changes.

One of the difficulties I see all the time in my industry is people wanting to throw technology at a problem because "Technology is modern!". Of course there can be efficiencies gained by supplementing exiting processes with technology. But if your process is broken in the first place, technology can really only make it break more efficiently.

As such there are three professional maxims I abide by:
1) If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
2) Keep it Simple.
3) Sometimes the exact right thing to do is nothing at all.

Sorry I couldn't handle reading it. Just seemed really whiny and curmudgeon'ish. Mind you I like my simple bikes and electronic shifting doesn't do anything for me but what else is the bicycle industry supposed to do? What wins on Sunday sells on Monday. I'm still hoping for wireless downtube friction shifters and hydraulic Mafac Racers and carbon turkey levers. People like the latest and greatest and gives LBS's business to service all these bikes that can't be fixed with wrench and screw drivers.

I think an issue is when companies like Sram like kicking out product and letting consumers be their test monkeys.

I don't think I agree with the premise. The author is looking at the top of the market where things change all the time. Right now the ur-bike at the bottom of the lineup is still a 3x7 MTB - like a Trek 820, or like most Walmart bikes for that matter. The last major change it got was V-brakes and front suspension, about 15 years ago. You might be able to argue it's not as well made as a Varsity, but for the only bike owned by the average occasional rider, it's a much better bike. It's more comfortable and easier to shift and with fat tires and a vast gear range, it can go more places. Upgrades are widely available and effective. How far up the lineup do you have to go to find 1x11 speed and clutch derailleurs? The latter appears at Deore level, the former now at XT level. When something really good comes along it does move down the lineup until it's everywhere - this happened with the MTB format supplanting 10-speeds, along with indexing, V brakes, alloy rims, and one step further up, freehubs and disks. But I don't expect to see 1x11 hydraulic-brake Alivio or Tourney any time soon.

OK, after reading the posts, I'll read the durn article.
Darth, I actually think the Trek 820 is one of the best bikes of all time,
Cheap. Bulletproof. Repairable. Simple.
Road or Gravel. Rain and Shine. Dogs and Cats.

A quick trip over to the Road forum will validate the author's concerns. The advocates for disc brakes and electronic shifting will beat the drum until you are deaf. I'm quite confident my late model Tarmac will be a C&V bike before it's anywhere near 25 years old. And when you look at MTBs, it gets worse.
One look at the number of MTB models, styles, wheel sizes, suspensions, variations in fork design points out how absurd the marketeers have become. It isn't just 26 vs 27.5 vs 29, add to the mix fat tire, dual or single suspension, multi gear crank vs single speed, hydraulic brakes (because mechanical brakes that can easily throw you over the handlebars in a panic stop are not good enough), downhill bike vs cross country vs technical trail and of course "all mountain". No wonder the number of independent bicycle shops in the US has declined by over 1/3 since 2005. Some day we might be able to make sense of all this, but right now it feels like marketing chaos.

I think I sold 820's the most while at the shop. People wanted the cheapest "bike shop" bike or cheapest Trek we had. Men, women and kids all went home with those things. I even had an 820 last year that someone left at the shop. They were on vacation and someone came and stole the wheels, seatpost and saddle and cut all the cables and housing while it was on the back of their RV. It was cheaper to buy a new 820 since they're only $320 compared to the parts and service for rebuild their old 820. I wished they would of kept the rigid fork on those bikes instead of the cheesy Suntour fork that weigh more then the frames. I built mine into a econo dropbar mtb but it was quite the tank.

OK, I've read the article. That dude would be pretty comfortable on L'Ombra. I think rhm's Fathergill is as cool as Heine's Rene Herse.
The guys on C&V at the Dare and Bartali and L'Ombra are easily having as good a time as can be had, on freewheel and friction.
I always wondered if that kind of stuff catches on, will it get so popular that it's no longer fun?

Having met a multiple winner of the Tour Divide (the guy from the documentary), I can say that he's not about the bike; if it rolls it works.
He basically won his Tours because he knew what to do, where to go, and how to get there; equal parts capable rider, savvy traveler and enjoyer of the trip.
Seriously, do the intense hammering guys stop to put coffee grounds on a Sarah Lee cherry pie and savor it? Chris would ride a Trek 820 any day, and like it.

I figure sooner or later, most of us have the light-bulb moment. We turn to N+maybe-if-it-works-better. Pure collecting is a bit different.

Our C&V cheap niche bikes have yet to really give up much to the latest greatest gotta have-a new thing 'cause I don't want to fall behind.
If the gap were far greater, perhaps we'd be a bit less smug. Perhaps if we were all younger, but some of the biggest C&V fans I know are young.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's probably just as much fun to play in that sandbox, too. For me it would be like sub-Christmas, over and over.

I have a friend, started on a Trek 330 Elance. He's had the best bikes you can get in his home shop, ridden, re-sold, parted out, etc.
Carbon wheels, 2x11 SRAM Red, DA9000, Di2, and bikes from Dogma to R5 to Propel to Altimura, Madone 7's, and an SL4 Tarmac.
Tonight, I'll be pulling the 2x6 group off of his "new" Trek 400 Elance so he can mount 2x10 DT shifters on it. I just have the BB tool.
He's coming around. He'll always have modern bikes, but the light bulb is coming on.
He still gets a little ticked, less self-confident when someone at the Road Forum says his bike is obsolete.
He is starting to laugh about it, though. Bikes are fun again.

When I was younger, and a bit smarter, I had 4 Ironman bikes, to the exclusion of other bikes at the time. They were not expensive.
Some guy at a charity ride asked me why I rode an old steel bike, and I honestly answered that it was about all I could handle.
To think I made my point and didn't know it, well, that's funny.

What keeps me on older, simpler (relatively) bikes, and coming back to them even when I deviate, is not the technology, or lack of it.
The familiarity is so much easier to deal with, and the challenges are less if you know someone, somewhere, has fixed that a thousand times already.

The people that hover around C&V ice that particular cake. That is not an understatement, or any attempt to slap backs here. It's fact.
I've run competitively and hung out with people who rode the same way, or swam, or all three. OK while I was in it, but embarrassing to look back on.
I just did perhaps my last triathlon. The conversation afterwards was almost unbearable. I don't care what someone's VO2 max is, or their mileage, anymore.
Charity rides are often a lower rung on the same ladder, but what's nicer is that many of the folks don't have a clue about their bike, and don't care. They ride.
It's fun to assemble at rest stops with people you don't know and decide who's going to do the next leg together, just because we're all the same slow.
Now, if I could just get those strangers onto some of these cooler old bikes and let them realize it's just as easy, but more fun, somehow.

I've not done 100 charity-type rides yet, maybe 60-65. I've had more fun at Bartali and L'Ombra, and the Dairyland Dare than the rest, combined.
It's the people, of course, but underneath that is "it's an old bike; relax, have fun." Now, to package that, and offer it up to the unenlightened....

Nice timing on this thread, as I'm collecting bike stuff for a swap meet in Richmond. Keeping the tubulars, selling the Garmin mounts.
Thinking about "reducing" a 2x10 Campy setup to 2x7 Suntour. The bike would look just as good, and I might like it more. You never know.

I constantly look at other people's bikes while I ride. My glance stays a little longer on older bikes, and I watch them work.

Once you've followed a Di2 for about 2 miles, it's just another bunch of cogs and fairly ugly cranksets.
Bike tech will be around, but I think it was more embraceable when it was more like what everyone else was riding.
The differences now, driven by consumerism, are more mental work than I want to do.

The article was a good read.

@RobbieTunes your last post is inspirational. It reminds me of what I like best about C&V, mainly the simplicity and beauty of older bikes.

New is nice, but the extra gains for the money and time spent has diminishing returns, at least for me.

I don't think it's wise to be entirely anti-tech in cycling, however, despite how egregious it seems for the big manufacturers to push new for new's sake on all us rubes. Yeah, most of this stuff is just a point of diminishing returns, and maybe a lot of it is wild experimentation that will end up as a technological dead end, but some of it may be genuine innovation that improves the way we ride.

Sure, most of us aren't interested in electronic shifting or hydrolic disk brakes, but we've all benefited from the manufacturer's willingness to try new things. Take tires, for example. There are way more options that allow different sorts of riding than there were even a decade ago. Some of this stuff is dumb and unnecessary, but how can we know which? I applaud the itch to innovate.

Technology, seems like we spread the stuff like peanut butter and jelly and assume everyone wants to eat it.

Good thing our ancestors didn't have the same mindset when the discovered fire...they woulda burnt da place down !

For me, the issue is sorting out which technologies benefit me, and which are solutions in search of a problem.

+1. Modern lights have made riding at night/bad weather safer & more enjoyable, in my opinion. However, they have very little value to someone who does not ride after dark or in the rain..

Mostly good. The problem with people who are critical of new gear and are still using 9speed is just that. They are criticizing from the outside. As someone who rides and works on new bike I have to say I love the constant advances in technology and yes you can feel it, especially with sport riding and especially on mountain bikes. I did got from 26" to 29" and it is a world of difference, then back to 27.5" and now back to 29". tire size and choice makes a huge difference, fat bikes are way cool. + size tires are rad and may take over. You have to ride it to know. I have used 3x9, 3x10, 2x10, 1x10 and now 1x11. 1x systems are awesome. The chainring life is just fine and it is fewer parts to maintain and replace. Front derailleur systems on mountain bikes are sort of clunky with rear suspension. The sport is way better off for having 1x systems and clutch derailleurs. They are awesome. Dropper post also are an amazing advancement for mountain biking. The difference in speed and fun is instant and you never want to go back..

the best part of the article is the link the the cycle systems academy podcast. You just opened a huge door for me. I have a lot of listening to do. Fun!

This article is simply another observation of the ever swinging pendulum of New vs. Old. And I think the piece is exactly what blogs and articles are for. Expression of thoughts, reflection, analysis of "where we are" in time. Ultimately, for myself, I always return to "Everything in moderation". My favorite bikes are a blend of old steel with new conveniences like integrated shifting, and as stated above, better tires, better lights, etc. I am continually amazed at what we can do. Whether this or that innovation is for me, is for me to decide. There are technologies I appreciate from the past and there are some that are just downright annoying or bad. Thank God we found a better way to do this or that.

And there are even others for whom new technology may beget the response, "who cares, just give me whatever so I can get on the road!"

Cool article and I really enjoy this thread!

Last year I test rode a fat bike with belt drive and Nuvinci hub. I'm not ready for one but really, really liked it.

Is this technology practical? Yes.

Is it reliable? I don't know.

The problem is not tech moving too fast, it is just that's it is brought to market before its fully ready.

Why you putting down my full rando rig with fenders, racks, bags, lights, and bell that I put together to go to the cafe on Saturday mornings?

I found it to be another us vs. them click-bait rubbish. Can't blame the author because the only thing that sells these days is confrontation. I am terribly sick of us vs them. There is no them, it's just us.

But other than the writing style, the author seems unable to separate need and want. I don't need a cambio corsa equipped bike. I don't need a Vittoria Margherita equipped bike. I don't need an EPS equipped bike. But I certainly can want one. And I certainly won't apologize for wanting one. I don't need to "make do" with anything if I choose not to. I'm no communist.

His best line was "TDF tech probably plateaued at least 5 years ago." An opinion just as valid as mine that TDF tech probably plateaued at least 110 years ago with the advent of the flip-flop hub.

I think that should be "2) Keep it Simple Stupid", with no comma.

Didn't I see you on the Rivendell Owners List........?:innocent: