Originally Posted by
Salamandrine
I'm also wondering about these super low gears. What is a 32/50 useful for?
Hills.
I can only imagine it's for getting traction on very very short very steep little hills and bluffs with lots of mud.
Mostly not about traction. If anything, traction is often easier to come by in higher gears, since higher gears make it easier to avoid delivering torque spikes to the rear wheel that might cause the tire to slip from your pedaling forces. The main time that might stop being true is if you bottom out your gearing and start riding lumpy because you fail to stay on top of the higher gear.
When climbing super-steep gravel roads, if you need to stop, it's often a good idea to shift to a gear a few steps higher than what you were riding at. It means you'll need to push with a lot of torque to get rolling again, but you're less likely to have to fight rear wheel slippage, or running out of downstroke on first pedal stroke.
Like with low gears in general, super-low gears like 32-50 are mostly about not bottoming out your gearing. Sometimes it's also about being able to accelerate: bikes get jostled around more easily at lower speeds, so when you've got a rough patch on a steep climb, sometimes the easiest solution is to power through it with a brief speed burst.
Seems like that's low enough that staying upright would take some effort.
No. In your hypothetical situation, we're looking at about 4.4mph at 80rpm. Even bottomed out all the way down to 50rpm, it's still 2.8mph. If the riding isn't technical, those aren't difficult to speeds to ride at. Riding on flat ground at 2.8mph usually feels very weird, but that's because the normal pedaling cycle is part of our bicycle balance, and you aren't going to be pedaling with normal force and cadence if you're doing 2.8mph on flat ground.