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WHERE are the $300 TOURING BIKES?
Here’s why we don’t have them
by John Schubert
company is offering touring bikes in the
entry-price portion of the market.
Let’s look at that entry-price portion
of the bike market and check out the
specs of some really good inexpensive
bikes.
thousand or two. What if it were a six- or seven-figure numIf anyone asks me for the best deal in
an
entry-price
mountain bike, I point him
ber? What if your average bike buyer were as likely to get a
to the $330 Specialized Hardrock XC and
touring bike as he now is to get a mountain bike or comfort say, “Shop around and see if you can top
this.” It has a high-tech aluminum frame
bike? More people would tour. Because they could. And
that dispenses with mere tubing for a
semi-monocoque configuration. It has a
some of them would
threadless headset. The RST suspension
find touring as captifork has 80 mm of travel. You get a
vating as you and I
seven-speed freewheel, V-brakes, and an
do.
assortment of other high-end technology
This isn’t just
that screams “buy me.” And the bike is
theory. It’s historicaloptimized for two-hour jaunts in the
ly established fact.
woods.
Back in the Jurassic
A person trying to challenge the
era, when I was a
Hardrock XC’s value crown might point
teenager and Lyndon
to the Jamis Cross Country 2.0, which, at
Johnson was presi$385, has an aluminum frame with an
dent, most of us
impressively gusseted head-tube area, an
bought touring bikes.
RST suspension fork, and a threadless
They were crude by
headset.
today’s standards,
Mountain bikes got you down? At
with their steel rims
the low end of this price range, the
and 10-speed driveDiamondback Wildwood comfort bike has a cartridge-bearing
trains, but by gum you could slap a rack on them and go places.
And people did so — in droves. Among my college chums, crank spindle, two inches of suspension travel in an SR fork, a
welded aluminum frame, and a quick-release seatpost.
bicycle touring was fairly popular, right up there with whiteAnd almost any bike company you could name would have
water sports and certainly more popular than rock climbing or
excellent mountain and comfort bikes in the $300 to $400 price
cross-country skiing. That’s why the newly-founded
range. These are the bikes that snag the college commuter marBikecentennial was able to recruit 4,000 people to ride the
ket, the new year’s resolution market, and the “gotta buy my
TransAmerica Trail in 1976.
Equipment wise, it was easy. You already owned a bike, and teenager a bike” market.
Now let’s look at road bikes in this price range.
touring was an obvious use of that bike. You grabbed a sleeping
bag out of the attic, bought some panniers and a rack, and you
But … there aren’t any.
were ready to go.
So go up a hundred bucks and what do you find?
Today, most people don’t already own touring bikes. They
Well, first of all, you won’t find touring bikes. So you
have mountain bikes, road bikes, and comfort bikes. And no
broaden your search for any bike with dropped handlebars.
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Would there be more bicycle tourists if most teenagers
and young adults owned touring bikes? I sure think so.
These days, touring bikes sold each year add up to, at
most, a low four-figure number — a
What you find are skinny-tire go-fast
bikes.
The $550 Fuji Newest 4.0 and $535
Jamis Ventura Sport are typical of these
entry-level road bikes. Their prices are
about as cheap as dropped-handlebar
bikes get. Both of them have aluminum
frames — one has a steel fork, neither has
suspension. Both have eight rear cogs and
three front chainwheels. Frankly, to the
customer who measures value by counting the high-tech goodies for the buck,
machines like that Rockhopper XC look
more tempting.
And if you hold out for a genuine
touring bike?
The Jamis Aurora, enthusiastically
reviewed in these pages two years ago, is
one of the cheapest, and, at $850, it’s in a
whole ‘nuther price range. (Let’s be fair to
the Aurora: it has nicer components than
those cheaper bikes.)
But why?
Why can’t road-bike buyers have
cheaper bikes?
Why can’t your neighbor who might
like to go touring with you get started as
cheaply as he can get started mountain
biking?
Of course, part of the reason is psychological — we just don’t think of the
fact that cheap mountain bikes can be
used for touring. And our retailers are
unlikely to tell us, or to stock the Old
Man Mountain racks that allow you to
put panniers on your suspension fork.
But if you narrow the question to
“why can’t drop-handlebar road bikes be
cheaper?” the biggest single reason is an
unintended consequence of innovation.
That innovation is integrated
brake/shift levers, which have become
nearly mandatory on road bikes. It’s
almost impossible to sell a bike without
them, and has been so for over a decade.
And they are expensive. (Shimano’s integrated levers have dozens of moving
parts.) That component alone kicks road
bikes up in price range, resulting in the
cost figures I gave earlier.
The high relative cost of integrated
brake/shift levers is a bit counter-intuitive,
since the brake and shift levers on today’s
inexpensive mountain bikes are so nice.
But that’s the way it is.
To my knowledge, the number of
bike companies offering the cost savings
of down-tube shift levers has dwindled to
zero. About two years ago, the last holdout, Fuji, stopped selling such a bike.
Well, what about bar-end shift
levers? They’ve been around for decades,
and in terms of mechanical complexity,
they are about the same as down tube
levers.
The answer to this question has two
parts.
The first part is a marketing question, which hard-core touring cyclists may
not appreciate. Among us cyclotourists,
bar-end levers are fairly common. Many of
you who buy custom, cost-is-no-object
touring bikes use them. But in the rest of
the universe, the only place you see barend shifters is on the ends of aerobars
used by triathletes. So bar-end levers are a
rarity, and they’re not on the buying public’s radar screen.
The second part is a price question.
Since bar-end levers are only sold to freespending triathletes (and a few cycletourists), the only vendor, Shimano, only
offers them in the pricy jewelry-like
Ultegra line. They’re actually more expensive than Shimano’s entry-level integrated
brake/shift levers.
There you have it: an entire important price/use category of bicycle doesn’t
even exist because the buying public is
picky about its shift levers. Fooey.
Shift over to your computer and tell technical editor
John Schubert your contrary opinion at
[email protected].
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