Originally Posted by
Herzlos
Did you consider replacing the drop bar with a flat one? If you loved the rest of the bike but not the bars, the bike police won't come and get you for changing it.
Yes, of course. The problem is, it's not an easy conversion. It's not just the handlebar, you can't use the shifters on the flat bar, so you have to change those out. And most of the time you've got derailleurs that don't work right with flat bar shifters so would also possibly require changing out. It would be great to find a project bike that needed a lot of work anyway and do that conversion, but that's hard to find with a disc brake frame.
Originally Posted by
Herzlos
There's companies here that provide the same bikes in flat/drop variants.
I haven't seen anything like that around here. We have a few shops, one that sells Trek and a few others, one that sells Giant, and another that sells Kona and Marin. But I've never seen them offer a model of bike with drop bar / flat bar as variants.
Trek actually does have some models that are close. Most of their hybrids are like that such as the Dual Sport, the FX models and the Verve. I'll probably end up buying one of those at some point and just upgrading components.