[Closed] When did you last see a kid on a road (style) bike?

my son (18yrs) commutes 26 miles a day from his new flat to work on a 1980's dawes steel road bike.
he say's it is the comfiest bike he has ridden.

Struck me the other day that only overweight armour clad IT muppets seem to ride MTB.

Its what sells I suppose but are there no bikes sold for normal people anymore?

on the Isle of Man there are lots (and not just because of Cav...). The weekly youth meet about 1/4 mile from me gets upto 240 kids of all ages riding!!!!

Up in Dundee there's a lot- big youth club. I've ridden road bikes since I was about 14 though. Our club's relatively young (mostly early 20's) and there's a massive proportion of mtbers (around 20) to road bikers (about 6).

Bit older than I was thinking I was more thinking of me at about 10 when a "5 speed racer" was the coolest thing going

Kid of around 13-14 regularly commutes to the local high school on a drop-barred racer.

I had a similar thought about this the other week.

One of my mates at uni has a standard off the shelf MTB (will have cost him about £250 at a guess) but he won't take it anywhere it might get dirty. I asked him why he didn't buy a road bike, seeing as he only rides on roads it'd be the much more sensible option. His response was that 'he didn't buy a mountain bike, he just bought a bike'.

Now I don't know how much cheap road bikes are but if somebody is buying a bike why has it now become standard to buy a mountain bike (even for road use)?

I got my first road bike last year when I was 20 but when I was younger I had bikes for jumping and the likes so never saw much use for having a road bike.

I saw a schoolboy on a Lapierre road bike yesterday, which struck me as surprising at the time. He'd probably just nicked it. 😉

Choose any of the following: -

Because a MTB can go everywhere a road bike does, but a road bike cant go "off road".

Because road bikes arn't as practical for a paper round?

Because you cant jump a road bike

Because road bikes have very skinny slicks that arnt great in the winter, and used to have weak rims that would faint at the sight of a curb or pothole that our roads are infamous for.

Lets face it, MTB's are pretty versatile machines, unlike road bikes. BMX's however, I have no excuse for them 😕

BMXs are good for kids as they're just about indestructible and require very little maintenance. Dey also look wicked wiv stunt pegs on, innit.

I've got a 16 year old lad working for me who rides a Giant TCR Advanced 3, rides several hundred miles a week and has all the kit. He's keen! But he is a rare exception.

This is true, it's all about the gnarl and wikkid awsum skillz on the local DH (anything pointing downwards will do) not copying guys in full on lycra nearly killing themselves to get up a mountain.

BTW I ride on the road too and my first proper bike was a 5sp raleigh racer

I saw a teenager on a cyclocrosser at Sherwood Pines a while back.

Saw a lad aged about 10 or 12 on a isla bikes road bike in Grantham on good Friday.
He was with his dad and they were both lycra'd up.
At Easter we rode the cuckoo trail in east Sussex. Saw quite a few kids on road bikes but they were all with roadie clubs.
Agreed you don't often see kids mucking about on bikes with drop bars.
When I was that age we would put cowhorns on and put a grifter wheel in the back so we could pull wheelies and do jumps.

Several kids commute on tidy looking drop barrred bikes in winchester, they're a blur of blazers and bad hair

I've sold plenty of 700c hybrids to under 18's to ride to work/school/college on. Admittedly, most of them are MTBers buying a second or third bike, but it's a start.
Parents seem happy to drop £250 on an entry level hybrid so Lil Johnny doesn't have to take his expensive, tempermental and vunerable DH 'rig' to school everyday.

I teach 10 year old kids road safety on their bikes and it seems to me that the manufacturers are behind the kids opinions.

I ride a Surly Karate Monkey with touring tyres and they never think my bike's cool. One of them said it would be cool if it didn't have the pannier rack! 🙂 Some of my colleagues ride road bikes and they quite often get comments such as "That's one of those cool bikes like in the Olympics!"

I was talking to a mum last week who said how much her kid was enjoying the course and how he wanted to be like Chris Hoy or Mark Cavendish. The road/track riders are making an impact on kids psyches. But the kid in question was still riding an "mtb".

It's just much easier to buy an "mtb" (quotes because most of them are shocking and would collapse at the sniff of a mountain). If you walk into a bike shop or Halfords or a garage selling £50 bikes, they will all be "mtb"s.

On a practical level, I have to adjust many brakes every week. "mtb"s with v-brakes are the easiest to get working at a reasonable level. Some "BMX"s (again not real BMXs) have v-brakes too. But the kind of brakes you get on road bikes are much harder to adjust if they're cheap and knackered.

In terms of MTB's being the standard- the cheapest bike we sell is £125. We only sell it at the start of the student year. Our cheapest hybrid is £280. Our usual cheapest MTB is £250.

You can get things with 26" wheels much cheaper than you can decent hybrids. People want the cheapest thing they want, because to most people bikes aren't something worth spending money on. So they get an MTB.

The cheapest road bike we sell is £470 and it is physically impossible to make a proper road bike worth riding for less than that. They verge on dangerous. We got a £300 Raleigh in once and it was equivalent quality wise to a much cheaper MTB.

Couple of young lads ride with our club. There is a dedicated club in Newcastle for under 18s although I think it's being dissolved and merging with ours.

Quite a few, road bikes seem "down with the kids" at the moment.
I even got "nice bike mate" the other day off a couple of yoofs.
Toyz R us even a road bike for kids now.

yesterday afternoon - a procession of lads riding home from the secondary schools on a number of drop-handled bikes of varying vintage. Pretty much exclusively wearing helmets too which is a good thing.

There were one or two on full downhill rigs and a couple of pootlers on bmxs too.

I think racers stopped being cool sometime during the 70's.

When I was a kid in growing up in the 80's bmx's were what everyone wanted. Hardly anyone had racers - those that did were generally shunned and ridiculed.

Maybe depends on where you are and whether or not there is a big road club?? I saw a lad of about 12-13 out with their grandad last weekend - Border City Wheelers top on the grandad. Great to see it!

Same in all sorts of other sports / pastimes though - angling clubs are becoming an old man's domain with very few youngsters coming though and it could ultimately lead to these clubs disappearing unless they get a damn sight more proactive..

Rorschach - Member

Struck me the other day that only overweight armour clad IT muppets seem to ride MTB.

Its what sells I suppose but are there no bikes sold for normal people anymore?

Rigid SS 29ers? 😉

I saw about 70 kids riding road bikes last Monday... my son being one of them. They were racing in our local junior closed circuit league.

There does seem to be fewer people making kids road bikes nowadays, Trek and Giant don't have one anymore, Isla do a few, I looked all over for a 24" wheel bike before finding this...

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Just got back from a training session, commuted on my road bike as I always do. I'm 18 now, but I must've started where I was around 16.

From 2008

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A dodgy knee and still managed to get all 8 stone of me above the clouds.

I know (vaguely, friends of friends etc.) of 2 other guys my age who ride road or track in this area. I know of no one under 20 that rides off road except me of course.

Mountain bikes tend to survive the tender loving care that the kids give them - I'll just park it by letting go.

Also I prefer to take my kids where cars are not going to squash them when they do something silly (stop suddenly / swerve / not look where they're going cos they're too busy trying to work out how to change gears etc)

I saw a bloke and his son out on matching road bikes last weekend, don't see it very often. I've never wanted a road bike until recently, I'm now 21 and currently craving a Charge Plug. Back when I was 16 you wouldn't be seen dead with a road bike - bmx or hardcore mtb only!