Please can someone explain the advantage of those massive wide handlebars that seem to be standard on some USA & Canadian bikes ?
They don't seem to be popular over this side of the pond.
Having never ridden with them I wondered why they are so popular.
Ergonomically, your hands on the grips should optimally be in line with your shoulders, or a little outside your shoulders; inside your shoulders, as on too many drop bars, is especially bad. A bit too wide is much, much better from an anatomical viewpoint (pain in the lower back, anyone?) than even a bit too narrow.
Wide bars are good for giving you better control with smaller, more controllable rider inputs to the bars, and wider bars also "slow down" big road or especially track inputs. So narrow bars are okay on smooth roads, but wider bars are necessary on off-road bikes.
The geometry of your bike also implies a given posture of the rider on it, which in turn imposes a relatively narrow range of handlebar widths.
About the turn of the last century, bikes in general offered very relaxed geometry with a bolt upright posture on a shortish top tube: the handlebars were swept back and the grips were almost parallel or actually parallel; the rider's hands were turned as on drops with the flats formed by the tops of his fingers and his thumb circling the grip on a line with the outside of his shoulders, in other words just outside shoulder width.
By the time the road bike took on its present (steel) form sometime in the 1920s, it was basically a contemporary roadster fitted with drops instead of North Road bars. The top tube was very much longer than in the previous generation and the geometry was around 68º, which would today be considered a touring geometry. Now nobody sat as upright as a generation before; on the roadster anything from a 15º back angle to 45º was possible by changing the width of the bars and the angling of the grips in two dimension; on a racing bike the rider was made to try for the desired "flat" back by drops with grips below the saddle nose, and these were made narrower for more extreme angles until they were made narrower than anatomically desirable for an alleged aerodynamic advantage. Notice that the roadrunner leaning forward with a good deal of his weight on the bars has more natural power with narrow bars than the upright cyclist who has only arm and a little shoulder power even on his wider bars -- he really
needs those wider bars.
Now we have to step forward in time to the rock'n'roll era, and at the same time back backwards to the balloon tyres on very early bikes. One of the parents of the current mountain bike is the beach cruiser of the 1950's, which had fat, low pressure tyres for functional reasons, mainly to ride on loose sand. The rider sat relatively upright and required wide handlebars to control the bike in the slow going in the sand.
The other parent was a bunch of Californians who rode with Jobst Brandt, an engineer who, besides designing the famous brakes on the Porsche racers, was responsible for many cycling innovations we now take for granted, and some (like treadless tyres) that were so far ahead of their time that they're only now catching on. Jobst had a road bike that Gino Cinelli had custom built under him (Jobst was very tall); of course the bike was yellow. The important thing about these rides, later famous as "Death Rides", was that Jobst would suddenly decide to go bush at the top of a mountain, just turning his racing bike into the rough. I linked some of these stories by some of the still-living survivors of these rides in my obituary of Jobst.
Some of the guys who rode with Jobst were already brazierres of bikes for themselves and their chums, or even in a small way of manyfacturing bikes sold through shops. They weren't as hardarsed as Jobst (in more ways than one, Jobst was a very hard case, as anyone who lost an argument to him could tell you) and the rides, even when they stayed on the blacktop, were tough enough in those mountains; after these offroad excursions they hurt. So an old beach cruiser was modified with narrower tyres, and eventually by small modifications, today's mountain bike was born. Ironically, today's 29er, which the marketers want us to believe is a new invention, is just a less garish (those early beach cruisers and mountain bikes were horribly tasteless concoctions) 1950s beach bike, though some, like my Kranich, are hugely capable touring bikes, so much stiffer that you can feel utterly secure placing it on a narrow road with big drops off the mountain on a high-speed Alpine descent. A Thorn Raven, if it could speak, would say hello to those bikes Jobst's pals built to save their backbones from his mad offroad descents of Californian mountains; the Raven would easily recognise them as ancestors.
So wide handlebars, in the functional sense, arrived on mountain bikes because they were on beach cruisers, where they were necessary to control the bike in loose sand: they were a natural for control on fast descents of mountains. Of course some made, and make, the handlebars excessive wide, as a fashion statement.
Personally, I like the common 600mm or 620mm North Road bars for a back angle of about 15º (which today is "upright" -- compared to earlier cyclists, we slouch comfortably) with a 45º sweepback on the grips which are also turned down about 30º in the vertical plane. This puts my hands on the grips in an ergonomically optimal position for me. Someone said the other day that even a millimetre of difference makes a perceptible difference -- and I found myself nodding affirmatively; that's what I've found too; now I see John Saxby in the post above finding 2cm in width perceptible.
Copyright © 2018 Andre Jute
