Best general bike advice for average beginner?

[Fab Foodie]

What we need is a flow chart which leads us newbies to the right bike for our needs. All these words are just too much.

CTC did this last year and published it in their "Cycle" magazine. The issue is that Hybrid covers almost everything from a non-sus MTB with big fat tyres to Flat-barred road-bikes. There's an awful lot of subtleties in-between, wheel size, tyre widths, brake-type, clearances etc. City bikes, are they a sub-set of hybrid or are they a seperate genus? Maybe City bikes are related to the good old Dutch "Station-bike" or Dutch "Tourer".

I agree that tourers make very good everyday bikes for everyday people, but there are so few about, however, the City bike is a damn good second choice sharing many of the tourers virtues. Such bikes do everything in Holland/N. Europe.

 

[Baggy]

Yeah they seem nice... if a tad suited to the older style riders!

How dare you, I've had mine since I was relatively young
I bought one as my getting back into cycling after a 15 year break bike and it's a go anywhere do anything kind of ride that I still love after 5 years.

So another vote for a touring bike as a good beginners' bike.

I don't get on with flat bars - but a lot of beginners seem to be put off by drops.

 

[scook94]

As an average beginner, yet to buy his new bike this thread has lead me away from a Kona cyclocross I'd been watching on that auction site and back to a tourer! (As previously advised by Andy) A timely post indeed...

 

[mickle]

Hybrid is a misleading term and utterly meaningless marketingspeak.

The mountain bike breathed new life into the bicycle industry which had until then survived by selling..

Road bikes. Double chainring, close ratio five or six speed freewheel, drop bars, short wheelbase, lightweight with caliper brakes and skinny tyres. 700c or 27" diameter wheels.
Tourers. Double or triple chainring, wide ratio frewheel, drop bars but with clearances for larger tyres and mudguards and frame eyelets for pannier racks, longer wheel base and cantilever brakes. 700c or 27" diameter wheels.
City bike. 3 speed internal gears, rack, basket, flat bars. 26" (British Imperial) wheels.

'Racers', cheap, 5 speed road bike wannabes.

So the mountain bike rears it's head, the first ones retailed for £800, using the cantilever brakes and wide gears from touring bikes. It didn't take long for prices to tumble and within four years you could buy one for £300. The old roadies stuck to their road-bikes and the old tourists stuck to their tourers but the cool new exciting mountain bike was attractive to newbies and attracted people into cycling which the old bikes couldn't have. Strong brakes, loads of gears controlled from the flat handle-bars, mountain bikes were surefooted and confidence inspiring compared to the skinny tyred alternatives.

Roll on a few more years and the mountain bike sales boom started to plateau. The manufacturers freaked out, they remembered the BMX crash of the early eighties when demand dried up overnight leaving them with warehouses full of dead stock. So what did they do? They were aware that many people were riding their mountain bikes on the streets so between them they launched the Hybrid. The fact that they had warehouses full of 700c rims and tyres may have influenced the shift but the fact is they were running scared and needed a new 'trend' as they saw it.

In fact all they needed to do to update the City bike was invent skinny tyres to fit mountain bike rims.

Although the edges between niches becomes more and more blurred every year a hybrid is, historically and specifically a touring bike with flat handlebars.

 

[bonj2]

I thought about this after looking a Bonj's thread on hybrids in P & L. A lot of beginners come on here asking what sort of bike they should get and a common recommendation is indeed a hybrid which, as far as I can see, is a racing bike with flat handle bars.

Well you see wrong then don't you. A hybrid isn't synonymous with a flat bar road bike. A hybrid is a bike with limited off road capabilities, while still being a lot less expensive and sometimes maybe a bit lighter than a proper mountain bike.

 

[bonj2]

I thought about this after looking a Bonj's thread on hybrids in P & L. A lot of beginners come on here asking what sort of bike they should get and a common recommendation is indeed a hybrid which, as far as I can see, is a racing bike with flat handle bars.

Don't get me wrong, I don't see anything wrong with recommending hybrids if that's what would be most appropriate, given what the poster describes their requirement are. But to recommend a hybrid when they have specifically said they want a road bike is a little crass to say the least.

It seems to me that a racing bike (irrespective of handle bar type) is at one extreme end of the design spectrum much as a fully suspended heavy duty downhill bike is at the other. Therefore what sort of bike should be recommended to the average beginner or somebody returning to cycling, assuming that they specifically don't want to take up racing?

My default setting is always a tourer as they are fast, are designed to carry paniers or loads (makes them perfect for shopping/utility) are comfortable (especially steel framed ones) and can happily be driven on woodland paths, canal towpaths etc. Then there are other "town" bikes (for want of a better term) which also come with mudguards racks etc.

Why not READ their post and find out what their requirements are??!
If generic advice that's the same for everyone is good enough then they wouldn't come on here and post a question - THEY'VE ALREADY READ THAT It's on the front page of bikeradar or whatever.
They're coming on here because they want specific answers!

Does this seem a reasonable point of view, i.e. that tourers are most likely to please most beginners, most of the time?

No. Don't mean to be rude, but you are being quite dumb. I can't stand people trying to give advice that don't know that much themselves. I've had it up to here with a fella doing it on the squash court, so sorry if i seem a bit angry, but it pisses me off equally in the cycling world.

 

[bonj2]

Hybrid covers almost everything from a non-sus MTB with big fat tyres to Flat-barred road-bikes

nope - wrong again. hybrid can have suspension.

 

[Sittingduck]

How dare you, I've had mine since I was relatively young
I bought one as my getting back into cycling after a 15 year break bike and it's a go anywhere do anything kind of ride that I still love after 5 years.

So another vote for a touring bike as a good beginners' bike.

I don't get on with flat bars - but a lot of beginners seem to be put off by drops.

Be calm youngster, I was only teasing
I have been thinking about a tourer and really like the idea of going on tour etc. A bit worried that drops might cause me back ache, as per your response this is probably a common thought amongst us newbies.

Ta

 

[Andy in Sig]

Don't get me wrong, I don't see anything wrong with recommending hybrids if that's what would be most appropriate, given what the poster describes their requirement are. But to recommend a hybrid when they have specifically said they want a road bike is a little crass to say the least.


Why not READ their post and find out what their requirements are??!
If generic advice that's the same for everyone is good enough then they wouldn't come on here and post a question - THEY'VE ALREADY READ THAT It's on the front page of bikeradar or whatever.
They're coming on here because they want specific answers!



No. Don't mean to be rude, but you are being quite dumb. I can't stand people trying to give advice that don't know that much themselves. I've had it up to here with a fella doing it on the squash court, so sorry if i seem a bit angry, but it pisses me off equally in the cycling world.

It's a good job I don't get easily offended isn't it? Anyway I can understand how your squash experience could have sensitised you a bit. When it comes to advice about tourers I do know what I'm on about as I own my second upright tourer and a recumbent tourer. The reason I started this thread, apart from being stimulated to do so by your post, was that it seems to me that many people decide to take up a hobby or sport having been inspired by e.g. top flight international competitions and so in all innocence take that as their starting point. Clearly somebody will state if they definitely want to take up road racing but it struck me, reading between the lines on a lot of beginners' posts that a tourer would be the best deal for most folk, if only because people don't realise how fast you can go on them. Add to that the fact that simply going off tarmac does not mean that you have to have a mountain bike and I hope that you can see where I'm coming from.

In any event, interested people will read your, mine and everybody's thoughts on the subjects and will quite rightly make their own choices. Interestingly enough so far, everybody who has posted who owns a tourer seems to agree that they are probably ideal all round bikes. The only rider I would add to that is that if you are going to cycle only in a (flat) city a city bike with a more upright sitting position might be a more suitable and cheaper option.

 

[bonj2]

To me, it's fairly simple. You're either riding off road for fun, in which case you're riding trails, and you want a mountain bike. OR, you're riding on the road for fun/fitness, in which case you want a road bike, or you're riding to get somewhere - in which case it's easier AND faster to stick to the roads, so you want a road bike. I don't know why it can't be that simple for everybody. Nowhere does a need for a hybrid come into the equation.
About tourers, some tourers may make ideal bikes, but to me there's absolutely no advantage of a tourer over my own road bike - even if I wanted to do some touring. The cynic in me says they're just the design team's/marketing team's excuse for the finished product not being that light.

 

[Andy in Sig]

Well the first bit depends on what you mean by off road. You do real mountain biking don't you? But I get the impression from this website that a lot of beginners think that if you go along a canal towpath or on a woodland track that that counts as off road (strictly speaking it does of course) and therefore a mountain bike is instantly called for, which is most definitely not true.

Your last sentence is one of your wind ups isn't it? But just for the record, the tourer is a highly evolved genre of bike with a long pedigree. But you knew that ...

 

[bonj2]

Well the first bit depends on what you mean by off road. You do real mountain biking don't you? But I get the impression from this website that a lot of beginners think that if you go along a canal towpath or on a woodland track that that counts as off road (strictly speaking it does of course) and therefore a mountain bike is instantly called for, which is most definitely not true.

Well, an XC bike is going to be just as good for it as a hybrid is, only more expensive. What's more it's going to give them the option of doing real mountain biking if they then want to, which a hybrid probably isn't.
You shouldn't see yourself as the guardian of people's wallet. Has it not occurred to you that some people come on here and want us to tell them to spend more than a couple of hundred - that they're looking for justification to do so/ or perhaps more pertinently, ammo to justify it to the mrs?

Maybe I'm fighting a losing battle trying to get people to represent a cycling forum with advice based on a passion for cycling rather than a desire to dumb down the proles.

Your last sentence is one of your wind ups isn't it? But just for the record, the tourer is a highly evolved genre of bike with a long pedigree. But you knew that ...

Well i don't see the advantages of a touring bike, personally - but that's another debate.




The point is Andy that there is no "average beginner". Beginners don't all conform to a specific mould.

 

[Andy in Sig]

I don't think anybody has an attituded of "dumbing down to the proles": they are simply trying to be helpful. What's more I'd be very surprised if people asking for advice here didn't use it as more than a springboard for further researches. For instance I pointed out on page one that you can get a new, fully specced tourer for 350 quid. It might be that somebody thinks, "nice in principle but I can afford a customised two grand one" and so buys the posher one. The same character might think, "I'll get the 350 quid one to see how I get on with that kind of bike and then I've always got the option of getting a super duper one".

Nobody's being dogmatic about this. While I agree that all beginners aren't out of the same mould, the requests for info which I've read on here certainly convince me that there is such a thing as an average beginner, a tag which would have happily fitted me when I first had an interest in cycling.

 

[rich p]

Excuse me for intruding but you can buy a half reasonable hybrid/flat-barred road bike for £200 (see below) but you can't buy a tourer for much less than £400. Which is the point for many beginners, right or wrong.

http://www.bikeradar.com/gear/category/bikes/road/product/subway-1-8831

 

[Andy in Sig]

You've got something there. I suppose the justification is that tourers come fully specced and will last a lifetime but so will a hybrid it it is looked after, I suppose.