why not road bikes?

In response to my previous post, a friend said that my speeds sounded painfully slow. As a road bike user she expects 12 mph pretty trivially, 15 comfortably. Given that I work somewhat hard to break 12 mph, I did have a flash of "why don't we all use road bikes?" A page or two reminded me of the tradeoffs. ( Read more... )

Conclusion

So yeah, my bike is slow, but there are good reasons why my bikes, and the vast majority of Dutch and Japanese bikes, are slow. We have other priorities, and the speed is sufficient for a typical use case of cutting short 1-2 mile walks.