On Mon, 4 Aug 2003 18:02:12 -0400, "Mike Beauchamp"
may have said:

I'm just wondering if purchasing a road bike would be more appropriate than
a mountain bike.

Road bikes, largely due to their narrow tires, tend to inherently be
more efficient. If the posture doesn't bother you, and your roads are
in reasonably good shape, a road bike is probably a good replacement
for the mtb.

I want something that can use my energy as efficiently as possible, and get
me going as fast as possible. Like many commuters here I'm sure, it's
definately more fun going nearly the speed of the cars instead of having
them wizz past you. Is a road bike as fast as I think it is?

Your results may vary; I find that I can, indeed, go faster on my road
bike than on my various mtbs, but I would not want to try to keep up
with the impatient homicidal maniacs who infest our streets at rush
hour.

In the past few years, I've added slicks to my mountain bike, etc. All in
the name of a smoother and more efficient ride on pavement.

So you've already narrowed the gap in performance, probably by quite a
bit.

Here's my concern. Obviously a road bike is going to be a more harsh ride,
with the small tires and the high air pressure, etc. Are small bumps in the
road going to be as bad as I think they are? Is that why I don't see too
many people riding around the streets on nice road bikes?

If the experience of others is a predictor, then the perception of the
harshness is probably worse than the reality. Some of the mtb
favoritism is actually pragmatic, in my opinion, but a lot of it is
baseless. I see a combination of the underinformed thinking the fat
tires are just better, the one-bike folks who want to be able to ride
in the dirt some of the time, a few who prefer the tolerance for bumps
and resistance to curb-hopping punctures that the fatter tires can
afford, and perhaps most prevalent, the people who buy the mtb either
because it looks like the best value or it looks neat. The only way
to be sure if a road bike's going to suit you, in my opinion, is to
try one and see. Do you know someone whose road bike you could borrow
for a day or two?

I'm going to go try a few road bikes out tomorrow, mainly for fun.. but I'm
wondering what people think in here. Should I stick with a mountain bike?
Another reason for wanting to get a road bike is that I can convert my
mountain bike back to offroad and have two bicycles for whatever type of
riding I want to do.

If the rides on the road bikes don't prove too harsh for you, I'd say
that having both types would not be a bad thing.

By the way, in a very unscientific sampling at Rice University here in
Houston several months back, I counted 22 mtbs (a few with slicks) and
only 7 road bikes locked up at a popular location on campus. This is
at a school where there isn't a dirt trail suitable for the real use
of an mtb within 15 miles. Up at Texas A&M, where bicycles are
perhaps more common than Democrats, I didn't try to count them, but
the ratio looked like it was on the order of the same magnitude and
distribution...and with just as little apparent reason. I rather
suspect that the fact that inexpensive mtbs are more widely available
than road bikes is the primary driving force behind those results. I
will note that the mtbs tended to be cheap more so than high-end, but
the road bikes included a fair number of good units.

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