Originally Posted by
Happy Feet
...
On the road, where I see 3x systems having the most benefit, is in the back and forth of rolling hill terrain where one spends enough time either going up or down to appreciate finding the best possible gear.
There were a lot of days on my last tour where I spent most of the day going over endless closely spaced hills in Nova Scotia, up and down and up and down, and on those days I was really happy I brought my Rohloff bike.
Do not get me wrong, I am a firm believer in triples, have triples on my rando bike and two touring bikes. And in some ways I prefer a wide spaced triple for a lot of things over an IGH. But, where you are shifting several times a minute, minute after minute, for hours, a single shifter is pretty nice to have.