Cycling UK Forum

What product for you has become common place and affordable that has become indispensable for your cycling? So maybe ten or eleven gears at the back has transformed your ride. Or perhaps 14!

I'm going start off with perhaps the most obvious - the high powered LED light. Although it started off looking very bright (to look at!) the light on the road was almost always underwhelming. Many recent improvements (eg: B&M Cyo etc) mean that it is a proper all round improvement to the cyclists experience. I would still like the light to be yellower. Blue white light still has a worrying ability to completely disappear down rainy puddles in the road.

But there must be other innovations and particular products out there that have made the difference for you.

Has to be LEDs. I don't think much else has developed so well in the last 10 years.

Road bike technology is limited by the UCI, so most road bikes aren't developed massively, there's the electronic shift technology but that's only of interest to racers.

MTB technology hasn't changed massively, the improved suspension pivots are pretty good, so the bike doesn't bob up and down while you stand up to pedal. Disc brakes have become widespread and more powerful.

Oh yeah, forgot about tubeless technology. It's made punctures pretty rare for me. So that's a good innovation, not sure about it being the best? but nobody likes punctures

The return to fixed wheel riding ... for some of it never went away .... steel frames and fixed sprockets ... single front brake .. minimalist transport..

LANDSURFER74 wrote:The return to fixed wheel riding ... for some of it never went away .... steel frames and fixed sprockets ... single front brake .. minimalist transport..

I'd put that under the whole singlespeed movement, which has made road riding and MTBing a lot more fun and less about performance.

Most of the tech on my bike dates pre-war I guess (drum brakes, hub gears) even though I bought the bike new only last year.

Apart from LED lights of course the thing that has impressed me most recently is those Ergon grips. Hardly rocket-science but they can make a huge difference in comfort.

I still have the front LED lamp that came with my bike about 20 years ago, and it still works, giving a feeble green glimmer.

The only newer technology on my bike is Kevlar in the tyres. I'm trying to the video working well.

Nobody has yet mentioned GPS.

GPS ...Yes its good for missiles .. but i drive 80k miles per year from penzance to aberdeen and still dont understand why people have a gps on, on the motorway ..." your on the motorway" how stupid must you be not to know which motorway your on or which direrction your travelling!!!!!!
Possibly you are not bright enough to have a driving license ..

LANDSURFER74 wrote:GPS ...Yes its good for missiles .. but i drive 80k miles per year from penzance to aberdeen and still dont understand why people have a gps on, on the motorway ..." your on the motorway" how stupid must you be not to know which motorway your on or which direrction your travelling!!!!!!
Possibly you are not bright enough to have a driving license ..

A decent GPS has traffic avoidance. So if there's a report of an accident it will get you off the motorway and route you around it.

Not to mention some record the route and how long it took then submit the data back to the software maker so it provides a more real world route based upon time of day, day of week.

I'd love a GPS for bike touring, just as I used to have one for car touring. But, as I've mentioned elsewhere, it would need a 32" screen.

for me it was "discovering" 26" slick tyres. I put these on my heavy old MTB and it turned from being an instrument of torture to something that I used more and more. This then led to the purchase of a hybrid, then a tourer......and now I'm here! SPD's, LED's are great also. Oh and 631 tubing!

Not an innovation, but the rapid expansion of recumbent HPV choice over the last 10 years has had a major impact on my cycling
Recent LED lights are brilliant, too

Personally I reckon ten years is too short a time frame to consider.
The bicycle as a device has been pretty well developed for some time and if you consider non bike technology, the big thing of the last ten years has been electronics. Try getting your car serviced without a computer or opening up your tv or radio to replace a valve (no I'm not really that old ). Hence people going for the LED or electronic shifting. True though, lighting has made a massive leap forward from this
set of lights


I think some of the more recent developments in clothing have been pretty good, especially mixes of wool and man made fibres.

Although just to put my ramblings into context, I've just splashed out on a brooks saddle and a carradice saddle bag - hardly cutting edge

jazzkat wrote:The bicycle as a device has been pretty well developed for some time

Er, the diamond framed bicycle might have been (despite the UCI's best efforts to provide an equal playing field) but other configurations, from folders to streamliners, are still being developed.

I think that recent LED lights are a massive step in the right direction, but I also love the way hydraulic disc brakes have brought decent stopping power to the masses. Clothing has been an area of huge progress too, with breathability, high-viz, comfort, etc being high on the list of improvements.

I'd suggest the cheap chinese labourer, working for a pittance to provide goods at a pittance, to cyclists like ourselves in the West. The huge reduction in price at selling point, has in many respects, made a far greater difference that an extra gear cog or two