You misunderstood or, perhaps, I wasn’t clear. I’m sure they sell a substantial number of bikes. But I’m fairly certain that they aren’t selling tens of thousands of units per year. In a bike market with 143 million units worldwide, even 100,000 units per year would be a blip.

To be clear, I’ve maintained for ages that a touring bike would be a better all around bike for people who aren’t racing than just about any bike on the market.

• Want a gravel bike? A touring bike can do that and carry a load while doing it. I’ve done many hundreds of miles on gravel roads while touring.
• Want a utility bike? A touring bike is made to carry stuff.
• Want a bike to go for a ride in Colorado’s mountains with their volatile weather where it is likely to be freezing, broiling, snowing, raining, and have hail all in the same ride? Take a touring bike because it can carry the 4 changes of clothing you need. Jersey pockets only go so far in carrying stuff.
• What a bike that is good enough for fast rides? Touring bikes really aren’t that bad at going fast.
• What a bike for “bikepacking”? Well that’s what touring bikes were built for.

While bikepacking is a “thing”, it was more of a “thing” 50 years ago. People doing bikepacking now are just doing it poorly. I see tons of pictures where people have piled more crap onto their bikes than I have ever put on my bike including back in the days of far heavier stuff. And it is literally “piled” on the bike in examples of poor loading technique. I use panniers and bikepacking gear and would never choose bikepacking gear for anything but the roughest off road riding.

Gravel bikes might once have been an okay choice for bikepacking…although they tend to be too short…but, just like mountain bikes, they are far more race oriented now. They have always been a little that way. Otherwise there would be no need for the Aeroe Spider rack or Tailfin rack. Both are kind of solutions to problems that really don’t need to exist.

While it is true that modern equipment is wonderfully light compared to 40 to 50 years ago, ultralight bikepacking gear carries the load in ways that aren’t conducive to good bike handling nor to easy portability of the gear in the bags. A set of panniers can be organized into a logical order that is easy to transport off the bike. Bikepacking gear has weird shapes that make organization difficult and totally illogical. My stove fits into a tiny triangular corner of one of my bikepacking bags but the fuel canister fits into a completely different bag. My tooth brush fits in one place but the cup for rinsing my mouth fits somewhere else. My utensils fit in a completely different bag from my food. I generally have to completely unpack the bags to get everything I need for camp…including my clothes because my stove is under those…and then repack it

With panniers, my stove, fuel, pots, cup and other stuff for cooking fit in one bag. Food is in another. Clothing is in another. I only have to pull out what I need rather than rummage through a bunch of bags to find what I need for camp.

If I have to move the bike and the gear separately…transportation being the primary reason…the panniers pop off the bike and are easy to carry in two hands. With bike packing gear I have a bunch of oddly shaped bags that are difficult to remove from the bike…don’t want them bouncing off on a rocky jeep road…and are difficult to carry since they don’t mate together like panniers do. Don’t get me wrong, bikepacking bags are better for rough travel than panniers but I don’t want to be hassling with them for 6 or 7 weeks on the road.

You’ll get no argument from me on that point. Been riding a Cannondale touring bike since 2003 with nary a problem. But ‘Mericans are terrified that aluminum will asplode and leave them as but a grease stain on the road. Steel, on the other hand, will allow them to enjoy the gentle pleasures of the blacksmith’s daughter as he pounds their bikes back into shape under the spreading chestnut tree

Agreed, that whatever amount of touring bikes Koga sells represents a blip in the worldwide market. But they're apparently selling a satisfactory number, what with having six different models. So whatever the market is in Europe for touring bikes, they likely have a good chunk of it.

That number of models represents just their "trekking" (loaded/grand-touring) bikes, by the way. They have another bunch of flat-bar bikes that they call their "city" and "touring" bikes.

Also agree that touring bikes are underappreciated for their versatility. The only category that's even more underappreciated is that of hybrids.

I have a house full of bikes (it's a small Baltimore row house, so that's not saying much), but the one I've put the most miles on for the last couple of years is a 1995 Cannondale H300 hybrid. They used the same frame for their touring bike.

As did a number of manufacturers. It's funny to think of people visiting bike stores and bemoaning the lack of touring bikes while walking past a dozen hybrids on the sales floor. Where did the touring bikes go? That's where.

I don't tour, but I use my hybrid for all the other kinds of riding you listed. Adding fenders, a front low-rider rack, and panniers turned it into the best all-rounder I could desire.

Plus the aero bars that I bolted onto the stock flat bars actually make it a bit faster on level roads and even rolling terrain than my drop-bar bikes.

The other great thing about hybrids is that a decent one has all the versatility of a traditional touring bike and yet generally costs less than a comparably equipped tourer.

I won’t disagree. The real problem is that most people working in the bike industry from the lowliest mechanic to the designers are race oriented and push the race culture. Because they push race culture, the customer wants race culture although most of them would be better served by a utilitarian culture. Utilitarian bikes don’t need to be monstrously heavy beasts but most of them are…because the race guys don’t like them. ‘Round and round it goes.

I rediscovered that lately. My daughter needed a bike for Denver and, possibly for a trip I’ve been thinking about. I happen to have a near endless supply of bikes from two different co-ops and a Trek FX hybrid came in that was her size. The more I looked at the bike, the more I realized that it was long like a traditional touring bike. Once I measured it, I found that it had about the same measurements as my Cannondale touring bike. I put drop bars on it and it became a real® touring bike.

I would say that the hybrid is a bit less maligned than touring bikes, however. There are sure a whole bunch of them out there. Way more than touring bikes. But I get what you are saying. The racer boys don’t like them so they get short shrift.

I said backpacking; you said bikepacking.

Okay, so put your ultralight self-contained gear in panniers.



I don't have any data, but I do wonder if 2025's neophyte cyclotourist looks at the (lack of) weight and volume of modern gear and decides a lighter bike than the Marrakesh or 520 is asymptoticly optimum.



(I COVID-boredom built two bikes from the frame up. Both have the same low gear, tire width and discs. The Motobecane Turino is a non-trivial 10 pounds lighter than the Surly Disc Trucker. Unless I was headed to Patagonia, I'd take the Motobecane.)

What were the comparative weights of a 1985 ST400 and 520?

The gear is similar. The only addition is a bicycle.

No. I put ultra light self-contain gear in panniers or bikepacking gear depending on the application. My bikepacking trips are relatively short…3 to 4 days…but over rougher terrain on a mountain bike. My touring trips tend to be weeks long and, frankly, I don’t want to deal with the hassle of bikepacking and packing the bags. I can deal with it for a few days and over the terrain I bikepack but I’d go stark raving bonkers if I had to do it for more than a week.

In a lot of instances they may not know a better way. I’ve toured with 2 large bags on a short frame bike. Downhills on a 7% grade twisty mountain roads were frightening. I’ve done similar (or worse) on a touring bike with 4 panniers and a classic touring geometry (a Cannondale T800) and the downhill was faster and easier than the 2 panniers system. I’ve also bikepacked numerous times on my mountain bike and the downhills are difficult for a different reason. The high load makes headers much more likely and requires a lot more effort to avoid them. I’ve done plenty of headers even then.

Although it was long ago, I was once a neophyte as well. I learned lots of stuff over the last 50 years. Some I learned on my own but a lot of what I learned I learned from others, perhaps most of what I’ve learned is from others.

The Disc Trucker (and LHT before it) is a pretty heavy bike. It’s one of the reasons I ride a Cannondale.

A lot, perhaps most of the touring bikes in continental Europe are flat bar bikes, which I suspect you would say proves your point, as they look like a hybrid. But they are quite different.

If you did tour very much you would know that longer chainstays are needed for touring so that the center of gravity of the rear luggage is not tooooo far behind the rear axle. Also, a shorter chainstay means you can have heel clearance issues with your panniers.

I have three touring bikes, one is a Lynskey Backroad. They no longer make the Backroad model, but my old Backroad looks a lot like their newer gravel bikes. But my Backroad has chainstays of 445mm and their current gravel bikes have chainstays of 430mm which is the same as my road bike. And for touring, a chainstay of 445 is still on the short side, my other two touring bikes have chainstays of 450 and 466mm.

UK, I have never been there so I can't say from first hand knowledge but I own two british touring bikes. They came in height sizes like everybody else's but they also came in short or long top tube models, the short top tubes for drop bars and the long for flat bars because they had two kinds of customers, the flat bar type ones and the drop bar ones. I am a drop bar customer, as I can't imagine riding all day in a strong headwind sitting upright.

Or, what about bottom bracket height? Touring bikes usually have a lower bottom bracket height than a road bike or cyclocross bike. The lower bottom bracket is still acceptable as you often are not going around corners as fast, thus there is less risk of grounding the pedals on the pavement in corners. That said, the touring bikes that are built for off road, such as my heavy duty touring bike, that bottom bracket is higher so you are less likely to catch a pedal on something.

My point, touring bikes are different even though they might not look like it. There are a lot of minor details that can make a touring bike quite different. My heavy duty touring bike is rated to carry up to 60 kg of load, not counting rider weight. Most bikes would feel like a wet noodle or they would break with that kind of load. I doubt that I have had that much weight on it, but with all my camping gear and two weeks of food on it, it still felt rock solid, even though it is steel and steel frames typically flex more than aluminum frames. My Lynskey is titanium, that usually is considered a soft frame material, but that frame was built to carry a load, it feels rock solid with four panniers, handlebar bag and a rack top bag.

I am well aware that there are bike touring and bikepacking folks on this forum that are super ultra light for their bicycle travels, comparable to backpacking gear and supplies. Some of them are former racers and they appear to have brought their racing preferences with them.

But when I am backpacking, that weight is on my feet, not on wheels that are designed to roll with minimum effort. So, weight on my feet, I am as light as I can practically be. Photo below, I wanted to take a break and get the weight off my back for a few minutes last summer on the Minong Trail on Isle Royale. Trip started with eight days of food on my back, no cans and mostly dehydrated, at the time of photo I had eaten six of those days.



But bike touring, weight is on my wheels, I bring more clothing, heavier (often canned) foods, etc. Could I carry the dehydrated foods and lighter gear on a bike? Yes, but my trip would be less enjoyable, so I choose not too.

That said, I am well aware that some prefer the ultra light bikepacking, if that is what they prefer I am not going to pass judgement on that.

Thanks to SpeedOfLite:

Road Test/Bike Review (1986) Cannondale ST-400

Glad you asked, tcs . I didn't realize that they were almost exactly the same weight.

The 23" bike in the review weighed 23 pounds, 6 ounces, about the same as the Trek 520 from the same year. (According to Google AI, "In 1986, a Trek 520 bicycle weighed approximately 23.2 pounds. This information is from the 1986 Trek Bicycle catalog.")

So the main advantage of the Cannondale would have been the torsional rigidity. As the reviewer points out, you can stand while climbing hills without the wallowing that can happen with similarly heavily loaded steel frames.

The Cannondales were conservatively built with straight-gauge aluminum until the numbered CAD designations showed up, signifying different configurations of butting in the various tubes. My 1995 H200 hybrid is labeled CAD 1, meaning it's built with plain-gauge tubing throughout.

I can vouch for those early Cannondale aluminum frames and their "torsional rigidity"
With down tubes the diameter of small coffee cans, and after 50 miles of bumpy chip and seal, my teeth were ground down to nothing. The early Cannondale touring bikes were a pleasant improvement in stability when fully loaded vs. some of the noodle like steel bikes at the time. Unfortunately the ride of the bike when unladen was quite jarring as I still bear the scars.

The Nomad Mk2 with a rohloff hub on the back and a SON dynamo on the front.

Me too, mine is red, from 1991, racks and Bob Beckman panniers fore and aft.

A 2016 Malvern Star Oppy S1, Gravel bike, drop bars, cromo frame, 32 front 36 rear 11-34 cassette, 50-34 rings, but currently in the process of changing over to 46-30, STI's, I don't mind them, they have grown on me. Have up until 2020, done 20k km, mostly with my dog in his trailer, had a break for 4 years due to covid and laziness. Got into ADV Motorcycle riding instead, now have comeback to cycletouring again, and still with my dog.

That Ritchey is a great option. But where do you get a custom frame for 2400€ (including fork) these days?

I do not know how "custom" the bikes from Co-Motion are, you can specify differences from the stock frame but I do not know about price. And I do not know if you can modify the stock geometry. I have never talked to them but I did consider buying a frame and fork from them about a decade ago.

I was on a group tour a bit over a decade ago, one person had this model bike:
https://co-motion.com/products/americano

His had tandem wheels (no dish on the rear), rear dropout spacing was 145mm, S&S couplers.

You can get custom geometry and probably certain other considerations or at least you could. They do have a couple models that are as they come but I think most everything else can be semi-customizable to a degree and maybe more. When I had my Cascadia built I had no need for a lot of customization though had I known what I know now I would have gone deeper and gone for more options but honestly the stock geo works fine and I was able to make everything work but I would have done a lot differently but I was younger and didn't have all the knowledge I have now.

Some eight years ago my faithful Miyata 100’s (one for touring, another for commuting) both had to be retired.Tourer’s rear end was bent irrepairably out of shape, commuter’s head-tube snapped.

I found a Bianchi Volpe and rebuilt it with wheels and parts I wanted (now my commuter). Then a Bianchi Lupo came along (same frame as the Volpe), now the tourer. Then this year I found a 2nd hand Volpe Disc and as I had so many spare parts, built it up - not sure why, but well, because

Thing is, the fit is absolutely perfect.



On the road at the moment in the South of France

I have 3 touring bikes: Bianchi Volpe, Cannondale T2, and a Surly LHT.

I'm not sure that the Cannondale would have been usable if it sustained the same inpact the LHT did. It was stupidity on my part. I leaned my bike in a bad spot and it fell over on a sharp metal edge. It didn't seem to affect the LHT.

Torsional rigidity, not vertical. The "teeth ground to dust" claim is always delightful to read but not grounded (heh) in reality.

Among endless other real-world data:

Why It’s Impossible For Steel Frames To Be More Comfortable Than Aluminium

just out of curiosity, I weighed each of my touring bikes.

• Surly LHT- 32.5 lbs
• Bianchi Volpe-30.5 lbs
• Cannondale T2- 33 lbs

The Bianchi and the LHT have the same Sugino 44/32/22 cranks, Velocity Dyad wheels, frame pumps, saddles, Schwalbe Marathon 32 mm tires, and Tubus rear racks. I feel the same as imi about the Volpe. It just fits well, and I tend to ride it the most. It is my second one. The first one, a 2005 that I rode across the country in 2007, developed a small crack in the frame on the toptube near a weld. The crack could have been there a long time, but I first noticed it around 2013. Bianchi replaced the frame and fork under warranty.

The LHT has a Tubus front rack, and 1 extra bottle cage.

2005 Volpe crack

The Cannnondale has Shimano 443 44/32/22 crankset, stock aluminum Cannondale rear rack, Mavic rims, frame pump, Brooks B17 saddle, and Schwalbe Marathon 32 mm tires.

There is really not much difference in the way the bikes are setup. They all have the same Shimano 520 pedals, and there is not much difference in weight.

Cannondale T2


Surly LHT


Bianchi Volpe

I always liked those Volpes, as it seemed that anyone I ever met that was touring on one really enjoyed it.

Shorter chainstays could be an issue. Depending and foot size, type/size of panniers, and type of shoe used, heel strike may be a problem. Based on a rough estimation, my size 10 shoe might be approaching the limit. I just measured the chainstays on the Volpe (430mm/16.9in.) and the LHT( 460mm/18.1in.), so maybe it is not a big issue.

It would be informative to hear from some of the other Volpe riders.

I have size 10 (EU 43) shoes, Ortlieb Backroller Plus panniers, and Tubus Logo rack, Volpe 55cm frame.
The panniers are attached far forward, and no heel strike.

In another thread, cyccommute criticized the pannier placement for being centred behind the rear wheel axis. I find this to be more of a theoretical disadvantage rather than a real world one - the Volpe’s handling is great with everything loaded on the rear except for a handlebar bag.

I think the good handling - and fit - may be due to the relatively short effective TT. On my 55 frame, it is 55cm: short for a modern bike.

I am 5’8” with relatively very long legs for a male (my arms are probably longer than the average for my height too). From the specs I’ve seen, women’s bikes would fit me well.

and to me these full BIG rear panniers are a disadvantage in the real world. heavy they make the bike a lame donkey. when I got my first low trial fork and started using only front panniers, wow! another world, the bike behaves like a bike, light and easy to handle. no weight in the back waving left right ... left right.... no wobble wobble in the back.