Originally Posted by
gthomson
I use the steel toe clips on my vintage bikes and I don't mind them one bit. It adds to the vintage look and I have no problems using them. I actually prefer them overall to clipless in that I would almost never get caught falling over unless I had a complete brain fart (which is not out of the question).
I've always wondered why they call riding shoes, where you have to snap into the pedal and use the same motion snapping out, clipless? I would think that motion is more akin to clipping in and out then just sliding my shoe in and out of the little rat trap?
They're called clipless pedals because they eliminate clips and straps. That's what they're called as in your first sentence. The clip is not the rat trap. The rat trap system is the special cleat on the bottom of your shoe which fits down into a rat trap pedal, so when you tighten the strap, you really can't pull your foot out. Of course that's seriously dangerous, a big advantage of clipless pedals. I never used cleated shoes, but my rat trap pedals wore nice grooves in the bottoms of my shoes, which served the same purpose. Impossible to pull my foot out, the whole idea of foot retention.