Spoonrobot 

You need to fix the formatting on your post to move the first part of your response outside of the quote tags.

Spoonrobot 

The City Runner was introduced in 1984? What page is it on the in 1984 catalog?

I'll answer for you:

The City Runner was not introduced until 1986 and as such was not featured in the 1984 or 1985 catalogs. The City Runner was also not a Hybrid it was an ATB. Miyata specifically states their "Cross" line of bicycles are a type of Hybrid. Of which the City Runner was not.

1984:

1985:

1986:


It looked like this, an obvious combination of the ATB/MTB and Commuter bicycles Miyata was making.


We already know drop bars came first and then flat bar and drop bars went head to head, where drop bars lost, quickly. Schwinn also introduced their line of Hybrids with exclusively flat bars in 1990, what does that have to do with what happened in 1989 and earlier? The Volpe came out in 1986 and was billed as a type of hybrid for road and mountain from the start. Not a city style commuter bike stretched into mountain bike territory like the City Runner.

What is your argument? That the marketing organs discussing and disseminating the characteristics determined and marketed by the manufacturers were wrong? Or lying?

The two biggest magazines at the time (1986-1990) were saying Hybrids had drop bars and 700c wheels and you're saying this wasn't true, based on what happened in 1990 and later?

The Rock Combo wasn't "far more road like", based on the information we have, it was weighted toward MTB with some road features (drop bars, maybe HTA). I rode one quite a bit, with drop bars as intended, two years ago, and it felt and rode much closer to an MTB than a road bike. The 26" wheels and overall design don't feel like a road bike at all actually.

Spoonrobot 

So what was this about?

cyccommute 

I made a mistake on the name. Sorry. But the “Street Runner” isn’t all that different from the City Runner and was not marketed as a mountain bike. From the the 84 catalog

Sure sounds like a “hybrid” between a mountain bike and a street bike. Still had a flat bar.

It looked like this, an obvious combination of the ATB/MTB and Commuter bicycles Miyata was making.


No, we don’t know that drop bars came first. You keep saying that and you are wrong. There were a few and even the articles you provided are split evenly…even if I accept your interpretation of cyclocross bikes being hybrids, which I don’t…between drop bar bikes and flat bar bikes. The drop bar bikes didn’t last for long. If examples from catalogs aren’t enough for you, how about the “archeological” record? I have worked at my local co-ops for almost 15 years. I have seen and worked on thousands of bikes. We have received donations of thousands of bikes of all ages from the 60s through the 2020s. Cyclocross bikes are a rarity in terms of donations and those we do get are usually much later…2000s and on…models.

We have never received any Specialized RockCombs nor the Fisher you pointed out. We don’t even get that many Bianchis and they are almost all road racing bikes. We have gotten a Volpe or two but I would place them in the touring bike category in both fitment, components, and geometry. The vast majority of hybrid bikes we do get are flat bar road style hybrids or comfort bikes. We have also never gotten a mountain bike with drops on it. Not even one that has be heavily Frankensteined.

They said that some hybrids had drop bars. I’ve said that myself. It was a very short lived fad and didn’t make it much past the Specialized RockCombo in 1990. The vast majority of bikes that were marketed as “hybrid” from the late 80s onward were flat bar bikes. “Marketing organs” tried to get people interested in drop bars for off-road use but it just didn’t catch on. The RockCombo is a very good lesson for those who wanted to force drops on the consumer. It lasted 2 years and sold 500 units…total! That’s in an era when mountain bikes were flying off the shelves.

Marketing people get stuff wrong all the time. Drop bars on mountain bikes or Fisher’s experiment with drop bar 700C hybrids lasted less time than U-brakes and that was a disaster.

It has a lower bottom bracket height and a head tube angle that is 72° in an era when 70.5° to 71° was more common on mountain bikes. It was a capable mountain bike…I rode one as a mountain bike for nearly 4000 miles before I broke it…but it was radical feeling compared to my 1983 Miyata Ridge Runner that it replaced when I broke that one.

It doesn’t really matter all that much which came first, drop bar hybrids were never much of a thing. They were a flash in the pan at best. Manufacturers quickly pivoted to flat bars for hybrids in the early 90s and they have been that until the gravel crowd discovered drops around 2010 and put them on bikes that are essentially hybrids with drop bars.

Spoonrobot 

With all the stuff you got wrong so far (Wrong date on Alan founding, wrong date on when Alan produced it's first cyclocross bike, claiming companies didn't make types of bikes I have shown you they did make, incorrectly stating the specifications for the MB-1, incorrectly stating the model and year of introduction for the City Runner, incorrectly denigrating the Cyclocross lineage of Hybrids, misunderstanding the Rock Combo geometry, and so on) I don't take you as a reliable primary source for any "archaeological records". Is there someone else at the Co-Op who can cosign what bikes they have received in the 15 years you worked there? As well as testify that you saw every single bike donated in that time? Can I have a list of everything donated?

You can't claim that one type of bike is a Hybrid because it helps your argument when that specific bike was marketed as an ATB. Unfortunately for you I read all the Miyata catalogs but I'll still help you out - Miyata actually defines ATB as almost exactly what you are arguing but not until 1988 - with all the bikes flat bar, 26" wheel ATBs. However, even with this definition it's clear their ATB line was a combination of MTB and City bikes, not of Road and MTB - "Cross" type Hybrids.



These are bicycles combining MTB and Commuting.


The nice thing is that we don't have to rely on you to determine which category a bike belongs. We can look at what the product managers talked about when designing the bike(s). "Everyone" in the 1980s put the Volpe in the hybrid category because that is what the product manager Bill Horner said it was - just as they did with the other drop bar hybrids - because there weren't flat bar hybrids yet and the product managers were figuring out the product marketing. There were ATBs with 26" wheels and flat bars, and there were Hybrids with 700c wheels and drop bars.

The Bianchi Volpe is the first Hybrid, Bianchi is unchallenged on this claim. There were no other 700c Hybrid bikes before this - there was Road, Touring, Cyclocross, and unique bikes such as custom and midtech Rough Stuff bikes, etc. Until the Volpe there were no mass market 700c bikes designed and marketed as combination of road and MTB - because "MTB" didn't exist long enough for the design and production to produce such bikes.

The drop bar hybrid continued beyond 1990 - both Miyata and Bianchi at least continued making their drop bar hybrids through 1992 and 1993.

We're not arguing duration here, we are arguing that 1) did X exist, 2) Was X considered by the industry as the default, regardless of duration. My answers, with mountains of evidence, are "Yes" and "Yes". You have still not provided a compelling counter argument.

Atlas Shrugged

This is your unique perspective, however a dedicated Gravel Bike is as unique as any other segment of the bicycle market. It's a vicious cycle of innovation – segments borrowing from segments. Why you would state Gravel is different?

Duragrouch

I truly do salute the extensive research and factual debate above.

However, I gently and tactfully suggest the debate end, before the mods close the thread. It's a bit embarrassing the number of threads that have been closed of late due to thread drift and, more importantly, insults. Benign arcane thread drift can be quite entertaining, taking many to new places in thought. But not insults, or even harshness of debate.

Thoughtfully submitted.

LesterOfPuppets

Looks like Hairball shreddin' full rigid!!!

Hella rad!

Trakhak

You're careful to specify "700c" throughout your post. ("There was no great selection of 700c drop bar bikes designed for off-road unpaved riding, nor was there any selection of demi-balloon or balloon 700c tires to go along with such. What sort of 700c Gravel bikes were around in 1984?")

Drop the 700c requirement, and the answer is that gravel bikes were indeed around in the early 1970s (and earlier) through the 1980s. They were called "sport touring bikes." Or, more commonly, "10 speeds."

Drop bars, 27 x 1 1/4" tires. They were ubiquitous. Back then, if you said you rode a bike, it was taken for granted that that's the type of bike you rode.

Like current gravel bikes, they were designed around a wheelbase that was longer than that of true racing bikes and shorter than that of utility/commuting bikes. Gravel bikes differ from them in a few (comparatively minor) particulars but still occupy a niche midway between road racing bikes and (now) mountain bikes.

Can't say I ever rode an Everyman's 10-speed off road, but some bike racer friends and I did quite a bit of fire road riding in the reservoirs outside New Haven in the early and mid-70's. We just used our racing bikes and training-weight (23-mm, aka 7/8") tubular tires. (So much for the inevitable objection that 27 x 1 1/4" tires would be hopelessly inadequate for unpaved trails.)

Gravel bikes are great. But from what I can see, aside from the obvious modern improvements in frames and wheels and components, they differ from the earlier sport touring bikes mainly in having longer head tubes, which ostensibly are a consequence of designing the bikes for the lower average speeds maintained on unpaved roads but also, coincidentally or not, work better for the substantial cohort of aging cyclists who imprinted on drop bars in their youth but who are no longer as limber or light as they were back then.

Edited to add:

Forgot to mention that after mountain bikes established a toehold in the U.S. bike market, tire manufacturers began offering 27 x 1 3/8" knobby tires. Gravel bikes!

Spoonrobot 

700c was part of the product differentiation of Hybrids, that's how the market category was created. The wheelsize signaled they were for serious riders who generally were road cyclists, while also appealing to MTB riders using an already available (but very small) selection of knob tires. Conveniently this also allowed bypassing the import protections around 26" bikes.

If one holds the bolded opinion, this argument can be made for any bicycle.

I don't believe modern Gravel bikes have comparatively minor differences to Sport Touring bicycles - just as I do not believe early Hybrids had comparatively minor differences to Road or Mountain bikes. Each is and was unique.

"Comparatively minor" is such a difficult term to accept. 10mm in bottom bracket drop can be difference between the average rider pedal-striking a rock and crashing, 15mm of trail can be the difference between in control along the cliffs down a rough loose road, or off the edge into oblivion. 1° of head tube angle can be the difference between a front tire impact shoving the bike offline into a tree, or not. The difference between rim and disc brakes (rim brake Gravel bikes came after disc models had saturated the market as the default type) is not a comparatively minor difference.

Sport Touring bicycles are just road racing bikes with slightly longer wheelbase and 27" tires.

"Any other bicycle with two wheels is basically the same as X type of bicycle" - is not a workable worldview.

I'm currently spending a lot of time riding a late-1980s-style CX and late-2010s-style Gravel bike on the same roads and terrain and the differences are very large. They get larger the closer to the edge of performance one rides. I don't even want to get started on how different a 1980s road bike feels or a late 2000s road bike, or a 1990s touring bike, and so on.

Bikes can be, and usually are, wildly different within their own type, comparing bicycles across types adds another major layer of differences - bikes across type and of different vintage even more so. Etc. etc.

As much as gravel bikes are a marketing exercise to move product - as is almost always the case, they are a different type of product.

I'd also argue that "midway between road and mountain" is a place that doesn't exist. Gravel bikes are more road bicycles than they are mountain bikes. After all, midway would mean that there was suspension somewhere - most gravel bikes are completely rigid, and have been since category inception. The category may shift more towards MTB as it has done in the past but right now it's more weighted towards road and given the discussion around aero looks to be moving slightly moreso.

Don't forget, many of the first gravel bikes were 2x 46/36 11-28 or 11-32 that fit 700cx40 max with mid-60s trail, 65-70mm bb drop, 44cm handlebars, and <600mm FC for M - then they got a huge dose of MTB and there was a shift to 40t+ cassettes, 1x, 50mm+ tire clearance, 75+ trail, 80mm bb drop, 46cm+ handlebars, and 610+ FC. This shift towards MTB that has been walked back some (1x, trail) but also pushed further (tire clearance), and in some cases is pushing completely towards road (handlebar width).

Look at the gearing, rotor size, wheel types, wheelbase, trail, handlebar type, riding position, weight distribution, and so on. How many MTBs have or even accept a 2x drivetrain? How many full-suspension gravel bikes have come to market? Gravel bikes are a blend of road and mountain with no specific set point, varying year to year but seemingly always closer to road type than mountain type.

Trakhak

Agree to disagree!

In fact, I'll withdraw "midway" from my statement that gravel bikes fall midway between road bikes and mountain bikes. You're right, of course; they've much closer to road bikes than to mountain bikes.

That said, both road bikes and mountain bikes have their own spectra of specializations. Zoom in, and sport touring bikes, gravel bikes, and endurance bikes can appear very different. For that matter, zoom in even closer, and each of those three categories can be seen to have its own range of contrasting design and configuration details.

I certainly wasted a lot of time and energy (and money) in the 1980's parsing minute differences between, e.g., Italian racing frames in my days as a competitive road cyclist. In my old age, though, I'm more of a zooming-out guy. I find the fact that 27"-wheel sport touring bikes have been reborn as both gravel bikes and endurance bikes to be an amusing truth, not an uncomfortable one.

Spoonrobot 

It's not a fact, it's an opinion. One so far unsupported by evidence.

This is the same type/use argument with gravel bikes.

Sport Touring bikes may be theorized to have had the same use as Gravel bikes and Endurance bikes today, but they are of a completely different type.

What do they have in common?

Wheel size? No
Tire size? No
Tire type? No
Tubing/layup? No
Design theory? No
Brake type? No
Stack-Reach Ratio? No
Gearing? No
Bottom bracket drop? No
Fork offset? No
Trail? No
Head tube angle? No
Tire clearance? No

It's not each one up for argument, it's the totality of the design and implementation.

The relationship between these two types of bikes is tenuous, unnecessary. Sport Touring bikes were specifically designed for casual low-time cyclists and had many compromises that became apparent when used by more serious cyclists. Endurance road and Gravel share so little it's pointless to compare. It's arguable "sport touring" was a meaningful category anyway - many were just down spec road bikes sharing everything else with road racing models. As time has progressed the Gravel trend has influenced everything else - sometimes by laundering MTB component types and theory to road stuff but sometimes taking unique attributes and imparting them to other types. Gravel has influenced both Road and CX while I don't believe CX has influenced Gravel at all and the Road->Gravel influence seems to be entirely focused on aero (outside of basic attributes).

We don't need to hunt around for imaginary ancestors, we have enough to research and apply as it is. There has long been a culture of specific designs for unpaved and off road riding - with road-style bicycles - that bicycles designed and generally accepted to only ride on the road aren't worth looking at or applying to the lineage.

Trakhak

Not saying that sport touring bikes didn't evolve in the intervening years. Just that that Panasonic would make a decent gravel bike, with the right tires. Or even with the wrong tires: as I said, I did plenty of enjoyable fire road miles back in the '70's on my Raleigh Professional with training tubulars. A bike with 27" wheels and sport touring geometry would have been better on those fire roads, of course, but we didn't know enough back then to realize that we were doing it wrong.

Duragrouch

I was not aware of import protections on 26" wheel bikes. Do tell of and when please, that's interesting.

Spoonrobot 

This is from 1993 but was applied sporadically to MTB and other 26" bike imports starting in the early 1980s. It's part of why some companies were introducing and discontinuing several apparently identical models every year.

Duragrouch

Thanks. What a cluster.

Used to be, commercial heavy tractor-trailor combinations were limited by a maximum overall length, thus to fit more cargo, tractors were cabover-engine (COE) designs, which rode terrible and were less stable with a smaller wheelbase. I don't know exactly when, but the regulations were "liberalized", so based only on the trailer length. Overnight, cabovers disappeared in favor of conventionals with long noses for engines, sleepers, double sleepers with standup showers, and everything on a much longer wheelbase which is far more stable. Sometimes, government has a clue.

cyccommute 

You nitpick so much. Since this thread has drifted so far, it is difficult to keep track. However, to address some of what you said above, I said that ALAN was founded in 1972. So does ALAN. Yes, I typed that ALAN has been making cyclocross since 1970. I made a mistake by not adding the “s” on the end of that date. I meant to say “the 1970s”. You never make a mistake?

You have provided a few examples of bicycles that companies made for a very limited time but the rest of the industry moved on. So the MB-1 originally came with drops. The next year they offered them as a dealer option and the next year they dropped drops entirely. Doesn’t that tell you that they made a mistake? Something similar occurred with the Fisher drop bar hybrid and the Specialized RockCombo. They were a flash in the pan and were quickly dropped.

I admitted that I had the wrong bike. Accept a win. However, Miyata did make a mountain bike style, flat bar city style bike in 1984, a year after the introduction of their mountain bike. And they added a similar mountain bike style, flat bar Beach Runner in 1985. Both are very similar to later versions of the “comfort hybrid”. Neither was marketed as a mountain bike.

As for the co-op, no, I haven’t seen every bike that came into the shop but I saw a very large percentage of them. Special bikes tend to get discussed by the employees and the volunteers. I don’t volunteer in a vacuum.

No, I can’t claim that one type of bike is a hybrid when it helps my argument…that’s what you do.

That ad copy isn’t saying what you think it is saying. Yes, it uses the term “hybrid” but if we read it the way you are, all bikes would be “hybrids”. “Hybrid” has many uses in English. The bike shown in the ad copy is a full on mountain bike of the era.

The Volpe was marketed as a touring/cyclocross bike. Even if it was described as a “hybrid”, the drop bar on hybrids didn’t last. The whole idea was gone by about 1990.

You do know that people were doing “rough stuff” on touring bikes before the Volpe was introduced, don’t you? The idea of the Specialized Stumpjumper was partially influenced by “rough stuff” touring.

You mean the Miyata Alumi-cross? The one with “cross” as in “cyclo-cross”? Or all the “cross” bikes in Miyata’s 1993 catalog that have flat bars?

You are not arguing duration. I most certainly am. I’ve stipulated all along that there were rare examples of drop bar hybrids. They didn’t catch on. And, as you have pointed out, cyclocross didn’t really become a “thing” in the US until much later…basically just before the introduction of the “gravel” bike. Gravel bikes are a hybrid between cyclocross and mountain bikes that kept the drop bars but they aren’t really something “totally new” as you have proffered. My 2006 Salsa Las Cruces is fully capable of being a “gravel bike”. My Cannondale touring bike is fully capable of being a “gravel bike”. It’s been used that way for many hundreds of miles on various tours.

Tourist in MSN

Maybe I should call my heavy touring bike a gravel bike?



Don't bother responding, I am just trolling both of you.

Duragrouch

Sure looks that way to me! But then I'm not a gravel cognoscenti.

Spoonrobot 

Incorrect. "Cross" as in "Cross-Over", as clearly shown in the catalog page I posted earlier that you didn't read. This is what I'm talking about, you don't know the term Miyata was using and didn't read what they called their own bikes. Miyata discontinued their drop bar hybrids after 1992 and Bianchi after 1993 as the sentence structure indicates.





I'm serious now, this debate has no where left to go. Accept the outcome and go back to the fields of interest that are more favorable to your knowledge and debate style. You made a ton of mistakes here, and turned yourself into an unreliable narrator. You've walked back all the overly broad claims made in the heat of the moment and reduced your position to nothing. I'm not interested in this anymore and I don't believe you have anything to offer, given the little primary evidence you provided at all. Learn to use the snipping tool or whatever screen capture you prefer, actually read primary source documents, track timelines in a spreadsheet, and come prepared next time.

I've never been in a situation where I make a point based on a statement within a document found in the second and third sentences of an excerpt, had someone attempt a riposte using the statement in the fourth sentence - which itself is refuted by the statement in the sixth sentence. Absurd! Read the whole thing!



This is my last response in this thread, good bye.

MarcusT

Really nit picking the history here. Not sure what the goal is. Between marketing hype and the desire for new toys, gravel bikes have taken off. Which is fine, it opens a niche where people were tired of road bikes and did not want a MTB.
Hybrid bikes were marketed towards families and casual riders. Upright riding position, bigger tires, etc
The thing that gets me is the aftermarket. Like gravel shoes, shorts, gloves, chain oil, etc. That IMHO is a scam

Tourist in MSN

I have never understood why road bikes had to have frames that only allowed really skinny tires. Although that did improve slightly over the past decade or two, my road bike that I bought in 2018 has room for 28mm tires without fenders, which was an improvement over the earlier bikes. One positive thing about the gravel craze is that you have a bike that is capable of being a good road bike with clearance for wider tires.

imi

I guess when everything had to be as light and fast as possible, narrow rims that can’t seat wider tires was the norm. So why design frames with more clearance.

Then came MTB’s and 130, 135mm hubs (where are we at now?)

I still think of 32mm as ’wide’, but have ordered 37mm for my Volpe which should arrive any day soon. 37mm is getting into balloon-tractor-sand territory in my world! 😆

Tourist in MSN

There was a perception back in the tubular tire era for racing that the narrowest tires had the least amount of rolling resistance when pumped up to absurdly high pressures. So the frames were made for that amount of clearance and no more.

When I built up my first touring bike in 2004 (wow, that was 20 years ago), I chose 37 mmm tires. A friend when he heard that tire size said the same thing you did, he called them balloon tires. The third tour we did together, he rode 47mm tires, that was a big change in philosophy for him.

My light touring bike uses 37mm, medium touring bike uses 40 or 50mm, heavy touring bike uses 57mm. The bikes can take narrower, but those are the only sizes I have used on these bikes. My randonneuring bike uses 32 and my road bike 28. Thus, when I go for a ride, I decide which bike to use based on which tire width I want for that route and road or trail surface.

With through axle, you can't make a direct comparison for width in mm. My light touring bike has replaceable dropouts, I have it fitted for 135mm quick release, but the alternative dropouts are 142mm through axle in the same frame.

cyccommute 

“Cross” did not mean “cross-over”. The ad copy below talks mostly about cyclocross.

Not that I’m accepting the Volpe as a dropbar hybrid, but Bianchi made the Volpe at least through 2022. And Miyata didn’t so much as stop making their cross bike as they pulled out of the US market in 1993. Even so, the drop bar on hybrids was never as popular as you want to make it. Nor did the idea predate the more road oriented “mountain bike” as evidenced by Miyata making a road oriented flat bar bike in the early 80s.


Yes, they are talking about gravely type riding but they are clearly coming at it from a cyclocross background. I’ve already stated that cyclocross was a “thing” long before even mountain biking was a thing.

That’s your opinion. Your arguments don’t carry as much weight as you think they do and you have engaged in some questionable argument tactics. The above is a prime example. You aren’t arguing the arguments but are engaging in ad hominem attacks.

It’s not the devastating argument you think it is. I stipulated early on that there were early examples of drop bar hybrids. They just didn’t stick around. Specialized’s RockCombo failed after 2 years selling only 500 units. That’s 500 units out of somewhere north of 10 million bicycles. Not much impact. The other 5 drop bar hybrids…the link is to only the Bianchi…didn’t have that much of an impact as well.


Let’s see how well that ages.