The All-Road Bike Revolution: Make Your Bike Fast, Comfortable and Reliable Hardcover – November 15, 2020

Excellent observations of basic bike design essentials based on hard data and research. I now have a much better understanding of bike design to guide me in buying a new bike or revamping an old steel bike.

With a shed full of old bikes, collected over a lifetime, I yearn for the one (or two) that will serve me through my, er, golden years. Such seems to me to be the promise of "All-Road"bikes. This text gets into frame geometry, and how it affects climbing, descending, handling gravel and sand, and loading for backpacking. And explains the advantage those new, wider tires with supple sidewalls perform better than the tires I grew up with.

Great book for anybody who loves bikes, dispels bike myths, and proves what really matters with facts and physics. well researched. Makes the case for a more comfortable ride being more efficient.

Really enjoyed this book. I've been a cyclist since the early 70s and was so fascinated by the myth-busting. We just accepted so many things as 'right' without any real verification by testing or science. Fun read for me.

One of the most informative and enjoyable books on bicycles and cycling I've ever come across. The book angles itself at riders interested in 'all-road' cycling, but there's so much interesting information in here that it'll be useful and fun for cyclists of any type and level. It manages to be fun and easy to read, while also being a compendium of invaluable knowledge about everything from components to riding styles. Experienced riders or builders will be familiar with some of what's in here, but there's enough detail and technical insight to reveal something new -- while still being clear enough for inexperienced cyclists to grasp and enjoy learning. It's also beautifully and simply designed, with charming illustrations throughout and clear diagrams to accompany the more complex technical stuff. Fantastic book for any cycling enthusiast.

This book covers a lot of very technical material about bike design in a form that is amazingly easy to read. There are two main sections: "The Science of Performance", and "The Parts of the All-road Bike".The performance section is full of useful myth debunkings. For example, it applies Amdahl's Law to bikes: if you are loosing less than 1% of your energy in the mechanical resistance of the bearings, upgrading to better bearings isn't going to save you more than 1%!. The discussion that I found most useful was the section on frame geometry and trail as it affects handling. I had not thought about Pneumatic Trail before, but this book explains it well, and consequently explains why bikes with wider tires, and thus more pneumatic trail, need less geometric trail. I found the sample geometries to be a bit slapdash, though — the text and the diagrams don't always correspond ( as with the Randonneuse), and some of the samples lack necessary information (such as tire and wheel size for the Porteur, and wheel size for the 'Cross sample).It's also a little annoying that the left and right pages seems to have been switched when binding, so that the page numbers are next to the spine, rather than the outside corners — this makes it hard to flip to a specific page found form the index.Each section starts with a nice quote — but none of them cites its source. I believe that mostly these quotes are Jan quoting himself from Bicycle Quarterly, but it would still be nice to have references to the volume and page.