Why is Gravel Riding Such a Thing?
 

Am being sincere. Being a long term roadie, I really love smooth as glass pavement and find rough pavement over many miles wearing and annoying. I have been mountain biking for at least 25 years and expect to bump and jump and go over rough terrain. Getting a bit beat up is part of the game and exciting mastering technique to fly down a single track. With the MTB I can go just about anywhere off road and since it is full suspension, soak up the roughness.

I remember when cross bikes first came out and the sentiment was a bike which couldn’t do road or off road well, but was good enough. I know current gravel bikes are much further evolved but are they that much more evolved? Is gravel a fad? Is it for people who want to ride off road but not commit to single track, so single track lite? Can’t afford two bikes?

Not a hater, just want to understand the fascination.

Because cagers are killing us with impunity

Because car drivers murder vulnerable road users & no prosecutor or cop is even slightly interested in calling BS on simple lies like "I didn't see him," or, "He came out of nowhere."

Simply put: If an unfortunate event happens, as long as a driver drives away & pleads stupid, even if caught, no one can prove they were negligent, deliberate or drunk. Therefore there is no crime.

Riding gravel allows a decent ride minus the headache, stress & risk of dealing with the clueless & entitled who have no comprehension of their power or consequences of their actions.









Also, our roads are carp because there is a strong attitude of: "Taxes are for others." The smooth freshly paved roads our grandparent paid for, laid out in tha patriotic fervor of the late 1940's, 50's, & 60's that gave rise to the bike-boom years are over. A gravel bike is just the right tool for the job in our crumbling infrastructure environment nowadays. Might as well embrace reality...most 3rd world roads are gravel too. Radical acceptance.

Gravel isn't for everyone. Smooth-as-glass road cycling is hard to beat.

I've never understood the attraction of riding a gravel road, but gravel bikes are more evolved compared to CX mainly by the geometry. They're long, low and slow steering for stability on gravel. However, that makes them sluggish on paved roads. I had a Diverge and didn't like it. It was a pig. My CX bike is probably my favorite road bike.

If you like hiking, trail running, nature you can't beat gravel riding. It combines both into something better.

I probably ride 90% road, 7% gravel, 3% mountain bike. The road bike is just the easiest to ride/exercise on every day. Right from your front door. It's difficult to find enough gravel or mount bike trails where you can ride all day without redoing the same hill/routes. At least around here. Someday I want to try death valley. Seems like you could ride forever out there.

Road wins out on destination and shear variety of places to go to. You can plan a ride from San Jose to SF via the coast with nice places for snack and bathroom breaks.

Now if I could just find smooth-as-glass road with 10 foot shoulder that went on for hundreds of miles.

It's quite the opposite where I live: I have at least 400 m of gravel from my front door to the closest asphalt road, so I literally cannot have a ride without any gravel. There are at max a handful possible paved 40-70 km routes (i.e. for the 1.5-2h regular ride) with minimal overlap, and even some parts of that would be chipsealed gravel rather than actual asphalt. Yet the rural gravel and forestry road network around here is rather extensive.

It’s faster than a mountain bike on unpaved surfaces where a mountain bike isn’t really needed. It also is a whole new market segment.

Word. My wife and I ride gravel bikes, plus-sized tire bikes, and modified MTB's here because the paved roads are so bad. It actually a bit of relief when the road turns to dirt sometimes. There just isnt any money for roads and proper maintenance. We pay no income taxes here in NH, but the property taxes are pretty high. Out of that, the school systems suck about 70% right off the top of any tax collected. The rest gets split between police/fire/rescue and roads. There is about 1200 people in my town right now, including all of the children. Divide that up into tax-paying households, and you see there isnt much of a pool of money to draw from. So we have to ride rutted, potholed, narrow, ill-kept roads. If I'm training, it takes six miles to get to the state highway, where the pavement is smooth-enough to be able to focus on your ride rather than beating yourself up.

A fairly large part of the shift in sentiment has come from people realizing that a more versatile road bike doesn't need to make as dramatic compromises in road performance as they thought. Historically, road drivetrains have typically been built excessively high and/or narrow for most people using them. And tire width does not, in and of itself, hurt performance as much as people usually guess.

It's hard to give a single universal answer. In any given area where gravel bikes are popular, if you look at what people are using them for, you'll probably find reasons that people like them.

Over here it's mostly because of the networks of gravel roads sprawled throughout the foothills. There are steep sustained gradients demanding low gears, and surfaces are often rough, but it usually doesn't get technical enough to really demand a mountain bike. And if you're doing mixed-surface rides that also incorporate paved riding in the shallower hills or flat valleys, it's very attractive to avoid the MTB. Put another way, there's lots of good road riding that I wouldn't want to take a skinny-tired road bike on.

https://i.imgur.com/VDyd8jy.jpg

official "gravel bike", or not, I like exploring off road, on easier/faster trails

one of my favorite unpaved rail trails
https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...501d177437.jpg
lots of weird stuff out there
https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...09e37e47f6.jpg
lots of variety too, to keep things interesting
https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...07fa84e6d7.jpg

https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...39d21478ca.jpg

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...b3cc0d42d7.jpg
why should power line workers have all the fun?
https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...b4af3bc407.png

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...3edac2b74b.png
this loose, steep descent was a thrill
https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...f1aaff9ec2.png

Climbing west to Lookout Pass at the MT/ID border would you rather ride this or 5 miles of I-90?


https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...785614221.jpeg

With a gravel bike with high quality tires you don’t need a glass smooth road for a smooth ride.

And glass smooth roads usually mean more cars going more fast. Lightly trafficked back roads tend to be rougher.

Its about choosing the right bike to fit where you want to ride, rather than choosing where you ride to fit the bike.

I like riding quiet, low traffic roads. Around here that means poorly maintained pavement or dirt/gravel. So a gravel bike with 38mm RH tires is the right tool for the job.

I also trail ride a lot. I have a real mtb for that.

Sold my last pavement racing bike 10 years ago and do not miss it… ever.

I had been wondering the difference between gravel and CX too, as around here, I haven't really had a need for either. Gravel routes aren't exciting and there are enough cars that there is no safety benefit. Plus, I hate eating their dust. We grew up riding on gravel as the only paved street in town was US85. Country roads were fun to ride up until that big farm pickup or grain truck blasted by and we choked on the dust, sometimes from the ditch where we had to bail out. :)

But, given different terrain like everyone's picturing here, I'd be all in!

Approximately 30% of the road miles in the U.S. are unpaved. In some parts of the country, having a gravel bike greatly expands the options for cycling. I don't know what it's like now, but when I lived in northern Wisc. in the 70's the highways were paved, and about 50% of the roads in town were paved, but most of the rest were gravel. The coast highway to Duluth/Superior, for example, was paved but in the winter when storms came off the lake we were sometimes forced to take an inland route through the national forest, all of those roads were gravel. There were thousands of miles of logging roads that were gravel or packed dirt.

Times Square is less than a 45 min drive away from where I live now (no traffic), but within a 1.5 hour ride I can find miles of gravel roads in upper Westchester and Putnam counties. Admittedly, near where I live you have to go looking for gravel roads, but that is not true in large parts of the U.S. I don't really want a gravel bike for where I live now, but in large parts of the mid-West, South, and particularly in the West, gravel roads are very common.

There are lots of packed gravel rail trails within easy driving distance of where I live - for example the D&L trail in Pennsylvania - and others in NY, for example the Erie Canal towpath - that offer hundreds of miles of packed gravel riding. My wife and I managed to handle the D&L canal on our tandem with 32mm road tires, but a gravel bike with wider/softer tires with a tread would have made the ride a little easier, particularly with all of the fallen leaves on the ground.

I'm not sure what Canada is like, I imagine the proportion of gravel roads is higher there. In Europe, I have no idea about the opportunities for gravel riding. As for Asia and Africa, and Australia, I imagine they have many hundreds of miles of gravel roads in some areas.

At least when they got started and for a good while after that, it's pure marketing. The biking crowd that buys bikes is somewhat finite in size. Gravel (or insert other current niche types..gravel probably isn't a niche any longer) bikes were the answer to the eternal marketeer's question, "How can we sell more of the same/similar thing to the same people?" ..create a need, fill it, market the heck out of it and ..boom..the gravel bike industry is born(or insert some other niche type).

On a more practical note, gravel bikes are a great "do everything" bike..like bikes sort of used to be maybe 6+ decades ago. Beyond new models, gravel bikes are also accessible from older off-road rigid mtn bikes or hybrids.. find a light-stiff older frame, build it up as a DB conversion, mount nice, fatter, cushy, fast gravel-street tires and have at it. (naturally, a successful conversion takes some careful planning)

On the newer front, this recent thread comes to mind:

https://www.bikeforums.net/road-cycl...ance-bike.html

In addition to the previous posts, I'll offer this: I haven't road raced in many years, but I do enjoy gravel racing. The scene is much more casual: some riders will actually stop to help each other with mechanical problems, there are aid stations with good food, and many of the riders are just as interested in having fun as in winning podium spots. And there is always beer at the finish line.

It's definitely a less stressful environment. And a lot less noisy. To get to a paved mountain road where I don't have to suffer 10 close passes every time I climb it, I have to ride for nearly an hour. Or with gravel I can be climbing in 15 minutes.

The whole "gravel bikes are a marketing exercise" isn't really fair. Any bike can be a gravel bike but if you're doing five hour rides on surfaces that are rougher than pavement but not as rough as singletrack, you want a bike fit for the purpose. Depending on where you live, you might be surrounded by lots of gravel roads and have a genuine need for such a bike. That's true for me here outside of Chicago. Also, gravel bikes are just more practical road bikes: more robust, wider tires, more relaxed geometry, lots of mounts etc. They make a lot of sense even if you're not riding gravel.

As a sidenote, I've noticed that people who say gravel bikes are just a marketing ploy simply don't have access to gravel roads themselves. They don't need one, so they assume no one needs one. This is particularly true of UK cyclists online, in my experience.

I wonder about those people to. I cant imagine the UK or most big cities dont have access roads or unmaintained stuff to ride. there has to be abandoned factories, railroad access, power line fire roads. Maybe I am wrong and their worlds just suck.

I agree. I built a gravel bike before the industry discovered gravel, because we have so much great gravel and you really need big tires in order to ride without getting a flat every day. At that time, it annoyed me that CX bikes were stuck at 35mm tires, because that was based on UCI rules for professional cross racers that apply to nobody I know. But if all someone has is silky smooth pavement to ride on, then sure, you don't need a gravel bike.

I have road wheels for my gravel bike and I have done long road rides on it. The way pennsylvania roads are maintained, it makes for a pretty decent road bike. The last long ride I used it for was in New Jersey, and it surprised me the roads there are worse than the roads here. I was glad to have 40mm tires for a lot of it.

In my area there are many miles of trails paved with crushed limestone. This surface is mostly smooth and mostly free from larger gravel. These trails are unlikely to be paved anytime soon.
My road bikes are fine on the MUP paved trails and on lighter use roads, but I really don't want to ride them on the limestone paths, or busy roads.
I'm building a more modern gravel bike for the limestone trails. I'm only going to use 35mm tires, as I will not be riding on rough surfaces. I've got no interest in singletrack, so I don't own a mountain bike.

My gravel roads are only a couple miles long and then a couple miles of old country road and maybe another stretch of gravel. A mix. It is nice that I rarely see a car. My gravel bike is a simple 650B conversion on an old very nice steel frame shod with 38 mm tires (could fit 42 mm if I wanted). If I were riding national forest roads in the Rockies, it would be on a mountain bike. I used to ride my gravel roads on a racing bike on 28 mm tires, it takes tire placement concentration whereas with much wider tires, holes and stones that might destroy the smaller tires do not even register on a wide tire running 45 psi.

I've always used road tires to ride on the hardpacked crushed limestone (FA-6 gradation) trails here in my area. They are smooth and fast.

Why do I use road tires? Because prior to joining the forum I never considered anyone would think I should be using something else.

Maybe poorer-maintained more-gravelley trails would benefit from wider tires.