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Comment by watchdogtimer | Hacker News Reader

In at least a couple of ways, bicycles have regressed:

1) It used to be possible to shift down multiple gears quickly (e.g., when coming to a stop light). Now, many index shifting systems outside of twist shift only allow one gear shift at a time.

2) It used to be all bikes had replaceable chainrings, allowing you to replace worn rings, adjust the overall gear ratio of the bike higher or lower, or change the ratios to create a half-step shift pattern. Now, many bikes have sprockets riveted to the crank arm and derailleur systems so tightly matched to the size of the chainrings that changing chainring size is no longer feasible.

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As far as #2 i don't see this as much as you; there are a couple of different attachment styles but the actual chain rings are usually individually replaceable. Cassettes are not but (a) they are often machined out of a single piece of material or rivetted together and (b) the range is so big there's not really any point to swapping anything out. The entire drivetrain wears together so you can maybe replace the chain once before you should swap the entire cassette, chain and chainring(s).

Re: (1), I recently upgraded to a bike with "brifters", and was delighted to discover that newer Shimano levers have mostly solved this problem. When downshifting, you can push the lever further to the right to dump multiple gears at once.

It doesn't work when shifting up, or allow for the truly violent changes I used to pull off with my friction shifters, but the convenience and speed of shifting right without moving my hands from the brakes is well worth the trade-off.

> It doesn't...allow for the truly violent changes I used to pull off with my friction shifters, but the convenience and speed of shifting right without moving my hands from the brakes is well worth the trade-off.

??? I don't understand. You can mount friction shifters next to your thumbs too. They only require moving your hands if you stick with less accessible frame mounting positions that likely only ever existed because it was easier and slightly cheaper to mount that way (one less cable guide, sigh).

I personally love the absolute simplicity of friction shifters. Doing finicky derailleur adjustments to make sure that every index step transitions smoothly is such an annoying process.

Shimano's indexed shifting products allow multiple down shifts. My 105 brake levers allow shifting by 1 or 2, depending on how far I press it. I've used their "v-brake" trigger shifters that allow more than 1 down shifts as well.

On the other hand, non-indexed systems never bothered me much. My favorite commuter bike was from the 80s and had downtube shifters. It became muscle memory and somewhat subconscious when moving my hands to shift to the correct gearing. It always shifted reliably and precisely. Maintenance was dead simple too compared to today's indexed shifting.

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