Two Bikes or One?

The great majority of my cycling is done on roads. Only rarely will I ride on unpaved surfaces, and when I do, it is usually only for short distances. I suspect that this is the case for most people. If you live in a city or a town, how often do you ride on anything but asphalt?

While road biking is best done using a lightweight bike with slender tires, trail riding is a sport unto itself and requires a specialized, heavy-duty bike. Trail riders usually drive to the trailhead with their mountain bikes on the roofs of their cars. Bona fide mountain bikes are a rare sight on paved roads.

For a new rider who plans to commute to work on paved roads but ride on dirt trails on the weekend, hybrid bikes make a tempting option. Why not save money and buy a bike designed for both on- and off-road cycling? Unfortunately, I have found that, because they are such a poor second choice to road bikes for riding on roads, and to mountain bikes when riding on trails, hybrids are best avoided.

I once took my hybrid on a trail-riding excursion with some friends who were on mountain bikes. The hybrid's shortcomings were quickly demonstrated: The mountain bikes, with their thick, knobby tires, were much more easily manoeuvred up steep surfaces than was my bike. My chain was repeatedly knocked off its sprockets due to all the buffeting the bike sustained, a problem my friends didn't have (it was an irritating and greasy job to have to repeatedly reset my chain). And even though my bike has front-end shocks, a blessing on the rough trails, the jarring terrain convinced me that a mountain bike's more robust construction is necessary for trail riding. Not many such rides would be needed for my bike to end up in the shop with bent or otherwise damaged parts.

Nor is a hybrid ideal for riding on roads. A hybrid has tires that are wider than those of a road bike and this makes the tires needlessly large for road riding. Increasing tire size means increasing friction between tire and road, with the result that more energy needs to be expended to move. You can easily hear the difference in sound between a hybrid and a road bike as they travel past: the hybrid is considerably louder. Hybrid riders work noticeably harder than road bike riders.

The presence of streetcar tracks might convince some of the need for a hybrid. These tracks are a serious danger to cyclists because of the possibility that one's tires might slot into a track. This unfortunate occurence has thrown many a cyclist onto the road, often in heavy traffic. That said, most hybrid tires are not thick enough to prevent a bike from going into a track, so one would as well have the thinner road tires.

In Toronto, storm drains used to be an issue for cyclists because the gratings were parallel with the cyclist's path. It was possible for one's tires to slot into a grate, bringing a bike to an abrupt stop. This is no longer a problem, though, as all of these drains have been replaced and now have perpendicularly angled grates.

Because of the considerable negatives and only negligible positives of hybrids, I think cyclists who want to ride on both trails and roads would be wise to spend the extra money and own two bikes.