John Dunn wrote:
>I started this thread and still don't believe that what you say is valid,
>Dave. I don't think they had anything at all to do with fashion. And they
>certainly have as much function as shocks, front and rear, on the vast
>majority of mountain bikes on the road (I say road because most of them,
>like SUV's, never make it offroad. And we're talking bikes that are way
>above $300 entry level.
I wouldn't agree that fashion isn't involved, but it is not the
shifters and extension levers that were installed for
fashion--rather, it's that the drop handlebars were selected for
reasons of fashion, even though they are unsuited to the needs of
casual cyclists.
> I believe stem shifters and, what you call "suicide" brake levers, were
>developed for casual, upright riders who wanted the shifters handy, so they
>didn't have to move their hands too far from the handlebars, and the brake
>levers just as handy. They weren't racers, nor did they want to be.
In the '70s, when these accessories were fashionable, there was a big fad for "ten-speed" bikes, and hundreds of millions of them were sold, mostly to people who would really have been better off with traditional 3-speed light roadsters, or, perhaps, derailer bikes with all-rounder handlebars.
Drop bars make sense to a rider who will use the many positions they offer, but the casual, fad-driven bike buyers of the '70s would often wind up riding all of the time on the tops of the bars. This meant they couldn't reach the brakes quickly, and it was a long reach to the down-tube shifters.
Stem shifters and turkey wings were a mono-buttocked attempt to treat these symptoms, without addressing the actual problem, which was that they were riding on the wrong type of handlebars for their riding style.
Most of these people, if they didn't give up cycling entirely, corrected this problem some years later by buying a mountain bike, which did provide a suitable riding position and convenient controls, albeit in conjunction with un-necessarily sluggish wheels.
Modern drop-bar riders understand how important the on-top-of-the-hoods cruising position is, in the general menu of choices offered by drop bars. Boomers in the '70s with death grips on their brakes couldn't use this position, because the usual installation precluded the use of a rubber hood, and the hardware was very unfriendly to the rider's thumbs.
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