At 6:53 AM -0800 12/6/07, Tom Dalton wrote:
>Ergo allows upshifting (moving to smaller cogs) several gears in one
>sweep. You push down on that thumb paddle by as many clicks as the
>number of cog positions you want to move through. With STI you need
>to press the smaller lever one time for each upshift you want. Jan
>was saying that when he drops from the large to small ring up front,
>getting to the next lower gear requires upshfiting three or four
>cogs, and that having to push the STI upshift lever, and wait for
>the shift, repeated three or four times, is inefficient.
> I use STI and it is my experience that you can click the upshift
>lever 3-4 times very quickly, while turning the pedals over very
>slowly, and run the chain directly to the 3rd or 4th cog up the
>freewheel. Ergo may be quicker, I don't know, but I don't think you
>need to engage each cog along the way as you upshift by several
>gears on STI.
If I turn the pedals over slowly for just 2 seconds on a 10% slope, I lose a lot of speed. The alternative is shifting to the small ring _before_ I reach the hill, but that means that I don't enter the hill as fast as I should.
As was pointed out in the "Randonneuring Basics" series, your speed over rolling terrain very much depends on maintaining momentum, and STI makes that difficult.
OT content: An on-topic bike with friction shifting, ridden well, should be faster over rolling terrain - such as we see a lot around here in western Washington - than a bike with STI. (Oh no, now I've thrown down the gauntlet, and this thread never will die!)
Jan Heine
Editor
Bicycle Quarterly
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Seattle WA 98122
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