Originally Posted by Bob Ross

fwiw ^^^this is my biggest beef with most Club rides. Posting what the average speed will (or should) be encourages riders to focus on speed...and, worse still, encourages them to focus on what their average speed will be at the end of the ride, rather than how fast/hard they're riding at any given point during the ride.

My cycle club did a long-term experiement where they tried to get riders to focus instead on perceived effort ...and to strive to maintain that same level of perceived effort regardless of whether the road was tilting up or down. So instead of posting that "the average speed will be 20mph" you would post "the perceived effort will be the equivalent of riding at 20mph on flat ground with no wind". When it worked, the results were sublime: You didn't ride off the front or drop the slower climbers when the road tilted up, and you didn't have a bunch of angry clydesdales cursing you while they grabbed a handful of brake during descents, and (astonishingly) the group remained together for the entire ride.

Of course, this approach absolutely requires that everyone in the group agrees to ride that way, and that they have a modicum of sensetivity about their own perceived efforts.

In hindsight I have to admit the experiment mostly failed; cyclists seem to really want to ride as hard as they possibly can when they can (until they can't), and screw all the folks behind them.