One to make you think- a weighty question

mobilekat

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11958903

Made interesting reading- obviously a daily commute is not the same as a race, but does make you think before spending money on things a few grammes lighter!!

RevellRider

I'm sure a more useful study would be measuring amount of energy used to do each daily commute

Mental Mickey

I ain't surprised one bit, I used to commute on a Raleigh Equipe back when I was 17 about 12 miles each way, it was a cheapo bike and I would often rip past those on far more expensive racers like they didn't exist.

I currently use a Dahon Jack as I work shifts and it;s convenient that I can fold it in half and chuck it in my spare room in the night instead of going to a dark shed. I find that just fine for short distances to town and paid £200 for it from JE James 2 years ago.

If I was to buy a road bike for a longer commute I'd definitely go for some budget option or perhaps Ebay 2nd hand after seeing this rather interesting article.

Thanks for posting it.

njee20

It certainly misses the point. If it's flat then there's unlikely to be much difference, the lighter bike will only be advantageous when climbing or accelerating. If he's a fat bloke plodding along at a steady pace it stands to reason there's little difference.

Mental Mickey

^^^ You've seen his 27 mile commute have you? How do you know it's flat all the way?

Maybe it's just possible you missed the point.....lights blue touch paper......stands back.

njee20

It's possible yep. I commute on a cheap(ish) heavy road bike, when I swap to my race bike on occasion it's a reasonable amount quicker, and certainly more enjoyable to ride. Which frankly is all I care about!

Northwind

According to some folks on STW it's a tongue-in-cheek article, apparently the BMJ do jokey ones around christmas. Not sure if that's actually the case, it doesn't read like it but there's absolutely no level of proof in it, and it doesn't compare equipment (ie gearing and tyres) or energy use (ie, does he just ride along at 20mph on either bike, but burn more energy doing it on the old one) in any meaningful way. Doesn't take me any longer to do my commute on my mtb or my hybrid but I'm shattered after a couple of days on the mtb

ddraver

If he's cycling through town with traffic lights and cars and such (probably not all the way if he takes an hour and a half) then it hardly makes any difference as those things will be what control the time. It's pretty common to get fitter and fitter commuting in London but the time of the commute does nt get any shorter as you just spend longer waiting at the lights

pilsburypie

I'd bet it was the tyres on the bikes that made the most difference. Cycled the 7 miles to work with 2.35 supertacky high rollers on one occasion and thought I wasn't gonna make it!

Slam on some heavily worn hard rubber virtual slicks and it rolls like a dream.....

getonyourbike

For most people when they buy a new bike I don't think how fast it is really comes into it unless you're a racer, when every little thing helps. People buy new bikes because they are nice to ride, and they like riding them. They're proud of them. We upgrade when we don't need to upgrade, because we want to, myself included.

Hell, getting new bits/parts in the post is part of the fun of cycling! I'm sure lots of people who use the bike to commute on ended up spending easily as much as the use of the car would cost them in bike stuff. Very Happy

bennett_346

Yeah, +1 to most of those replies. He probably tried harder when he was riding the steel bike simply because that's human nature when doing tests like these. If it had been a blind test, which is impossible with this, im sure the carbon bikes average time would have shot up.

allen.coulson

getonyourbike wrote:

For most people when they buy a new bike I don't think how fast it is really comes into it unless you're a racer, when every little thing helps. People buy new bikes because they are nice to ride, and they like riding them. They're proud of them. We upgrade when we don't need to upgrade, because we want to, myself included.

Hell, getting new bits/parts in the post is part of the fun of cycling! I'm sure lots of people who use the bike to commute on ended up spending easily as much as the use of the car would cost them in bike stuff. Very Happy

I agree with this - I bought my bike for fun - and no part of the decision was economy, weight or whether an alternative could go faster. Sure, I keep statistics - miles, speed and so on - but just as a training record. The author's obvious regret over the cost of the bile is not shared by me - I will never be dissapointed by the price I paid for my bike. And I don't even earn a poor Doctor's wage!

Happy Xmas!!

tx14

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_me ... al_content
see the part regarding christmas edition.

MountainMonster

While is most likely some form of joke, it still isn't justified.

For me half of the things I buy for my bike are not really for performance upgrades. At the end of the day, they won't make my times go down by buying shiny parts. I like them though, and I feel a certain level of pride by buying them. The best upgrade I could make would be to me by losing all the weight I need to, and cycling does that.

fungus_the_muffin_man

I have a Cheap(ish) alu road bike and a Carbon road bike. The time difference in my riding is negligible on the same rides. The comfort difference is huge.
I also mentally prefer riding the Carbon bike. As he poster above has said I have a level of pride attached to my expensive bike.

To me it's no different than saying in this article that doing my commute in a fiesta will take the same time as a Lamborgini.

meanredspider

Yup - along similar lines, I needed an incentive to get back to doing my 30-mile round trip commute after my son was diagnosed with cancer and I basically didn't go near a bike for nearly 2 months. A nice shining (albeit secondhand) carbon bike was just the trick.

richg1979

Totall bollox, i can cut 10mins off my commute and from av speed of 11mph to 22mph by changing from a 30lb bike to a 20lb bike.

njee20

There's clearly more to that than weight, don't believe you can average 22mph without giving it serious beans, and sincerely doubt any bike would only do 11mph whilst putting in the same effort!

P-Jay

This backs up a lot of what I've being telling people for years (on the PH pedal powered forum mostly).

Noob comes online and say something along the line of "Need a bike to get me fit" which is usually a que for the more lycra endowed members to spout on for pages and pages how that the lighter, more efficient, snazzier bike is 'better'.

My argument has always been that if fitness is your goal and not beating your mates the less efficient, heavier bike is better because you get more of a work out for the same time or distance and according to the less than perfect study above it doesn't even mean you'll take any longer to get to work if you decide to take your exorcise commuting, you'll just get fitter, faster.

El Capitano

I've done my 20 mile round trip commute on various bikes. Over the same route, my fastest time was on the TT bike. Surprisingly enough, my 2nd fastest time was on the NRS, complete with 2.1 Panracer XC Fire Pro tyres... I've also managed to average 17mph on the Coiler with 2.3 Nokian NBX's on this route. (Granted, it was a lot more work than either of my road orientated bikes).

The bike does make a difference, as do the tyres, traffic, weather (wind direction especially) etc.

That said, out of all my bikes, I enjoy riding my commuter bike on the commute more than any of the others.

bails87

P-Jay wrote:

My argument has always been that if fitness is your goal and not beating your mates the less efficient, heavier bike is better because you get more of a work out for the same time or distance and according to the less than perfect study above it doesn't even mean you'll take any longer to get to work if you decide to take your exorcise commuting, you'll just get fitter, faster.

Sure, if you ride 10 miles in one hour then doing it on the crap bike will be harder. But that's an odd assumption to make.

It's more likely that they'll ride for 1 hour as quckly as possible, whether they travel 5 miles or 15 miles is kind of irrelevant, if the effort put in is the same. In fact I'd rather have the better bike and go further for the same effort. If you want it to be harder then ride faster and for longer.

welshkev

El Capitano wrote:

I've done my 20 mile round trip commute on various bikes. Over the same route, my fastest time was on the TT bike. Surprisingly enough, my 2nd fastest time was on the NRS, complete with 2.1 Panracer XC Fire Pro tyres... I've also managed to average 17mph on the Coiler with 2.3 Nokian NBX's on this route. (Granted, it was a lot more work than either of my road orientated bikes).

The bike does make a difference, as do the tyres, traffic, weather (wind direction especially) etc.

That said, out of all my bikes, I enjoy riding my commuter bike on the commute more than any of the others.

what is your commuter? is it the focus?

El Capitano

Yep, Focus Mares CX bike.

bails87

As others have said, it depends on the journey too. My commute (when I start biking it again in the spring :oops: ) consists of 15 miles of open country roads. I go through 3 roundabouts and one set of traffic lights, so the time it takes is purely down to how fast I ride. I think the difference there would be a lot more pronounced than on a journey through traffic and 8 trillion sets of lights in central London.

richg1979

njee20 wrote:

There's clearly more to that than weight, don't believe you can average 22mph without giving it serious beans, and sincerely doubt any bike would only do 11mph whilst putting in the same effort!

A 30lb am bike with full knobblies vs a road bike????

Ur not going to buy a cheap bike with light wheels tyres so theres no chance of them being the same speed.

The test should be the same bike with ballast to make it heavy if its a weight experiment.

Theres no way a 150 quid barracuda is going to obtain the same speed as 2k road bike.

The wheels and tyres are going to make the most diffrence and on a cheap bike there going to be shockingly heavy.

Nachimir

Doing a 40 mile round trip with hills by MTB, I've found my fitness has made a much bigger difference than weight and tyres. After the first 6 weeks of paring the time right down, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference whether or not I have a rucksack full of stuff, two big chain locks, etc.

Semi-slicks made quite a difference, but not as much as I thought they would; I wonder if this is because I was working harder with the knobblies and the others make it so easy to get up to 20mph that I take it easy more and get a similar time.

Tempted to change chainset for a 48t from the present 44t, but not sure it'd make that big a difference.

In terms of the study being a joke, the wikipedia page says they do that on the Friday before Christmas, so not yet. It's probably not a joke at all, but it is tiny and deals with the subjective motives of just one person. As they do, news organisations pick that up and run with it. It's the same kind of thing that leads to all of the "X CAUSES CANCER" stories on the basis of some people squinting into a petri dish.

richg1979

The diffrence between a 300g road tyre and a nobbly 750g mtb tyre on road is pretty immense.

njee20

Not enough to double your speed for the same effort though, like I say, you're going some to do 22mph, that amount of effort on a 30lb MTB would still have you doing more than 11mph.

Nachimir

I can absolutely feel the difference semi-slicks make whenever I'm accelerating, but over long distances I tend to get similar times.

bails87

njee20 wrote:

Not enough to double your speed for the same effort though, like I say, you're going some to do 22mph, that amount of effort on a 30lb MTB would still have you doing more than 11mph.

Agreed, an hours off road (but fairly flat and non-technical) ride on the MTB will see me do an average of 12-13mph. An hour on the road bike would proabably be 17mph avg at the most.

meanredspider

richg1979 wrote:

A 30lb am bike with full knobblies vs a road bike????

The only time I've manage to go half the speed on my MTB than my road bike was a week or two ago. My MTB is a 10 year old Kona, fitted with Ice Spikers (at nearly a kg each), my gears had frozen (it was minus 11C) (I had just two of the 3 front rings and 1 gear at the rear), I was wearing 3 upper layers and 2 lower layers and I had to get off and walk for 100m at one point because the snow was just too deep. It took me 1.5 hours vs my best road bike time of 47 minutes.

This morning my newer MTB took just 12 minutes (25%) longer despite also being fitted with Ice Spikers and the bike weighing 4kg (50%) more. I'm considerably less fit at the moment too.