Originally Posted by
scottfsmith
I bet if Strava ran a data analysis on all the miles in their database done on so-called gravel bikes they would see that 95% of those miles were on pavement. Personally for me it is a lot of work to get to good gravel riding, it takes 1+ hours in the car each way. So I'm yet another 95%-er.
Anyway, in practice most people are using gravel bikes as road bikes with occasional gravel riding thrown in. Kind of like how SUVs today are doing 99%+ road miles. There is nothing wrong with that, but to me it doesn't make a lot of sense to own two different bikes when two wheel sets will do the job.
Trying to look at this from a more generic viewpoint. Would it be fair to say your "gravel bike" would be one that had the capability to handle wider tires (whatever that's defined as), and you'd prefer to have two wheelsets, one for narrower tires and one for wider? Would I be correct to guess you'd want disc brakes to make the changeover easier?