Disc Brakes Took over the Cycling World. Here's Why That Was a Mistake
outsideonline.com
outsideonline.com
A few guys in my cycling group who are still on rim brakes will not take the really fun descents, even when it's completely dry. They don't trust them. Pad fade, overheating brake surfaces causing de-lamination and popping inner tubes.
So, sure, if all you're ever going to do is ride on a flat surface in dry conditions rim brakes are fine, but not better.
It's arguable rim brakes are slightly more aero. I like my bones unbroken, so I'll take the penalty.
I also find servicing hydraulic disc brakes to be more intuitive. Having to fiddle with the tension of rim brakes' mechanical cables to get them just right was always much more cumbersome to me.
Sure if you get a leak on trail you're screwed, but that has happened to one bike one time in my riding group over the last 10+ years. I will be happy to have a cable-free bike someday.
In my experience with over 40,000km on Shimano hydraulics, the only servicing is swapping pads when the pad wear spring starts screeching against the rotor.
My early 2000 era Magura hyrdros were a bit shit and required a lot of maintenance and issues with sticking callipers, but shimanos made in the last 15 years are pretty much perfected and maintenance free.
That's a big deal for me.
I can't even lock up the front tire on my last two bikes, both with hydraulic brakes. They just don't have enough torque.
I had a funny, similar problem when I got into sea-kayaking. There are so many videos on Youtube that you can watch, and they will make you think you're planning and preparing to get into a sea-kayak, but, not a single one of them give you any sort of clue what it's actually like.
This article is similar (and dissimilar) to those videos. It's similar in that it makes you think you're understanding more than you really are. Dissimilar in that this is basically some old grumpy guy trolling. Maybe they're like that friend who "thinks" we should've stuck to using C to write our applications, and that virtualization was a mistake. Now consider e.g. grandma. If you were a third-party with no background into the field, you would not be able to distinguish the person being serious from your troll friend who enjoys "debates" and creating arguments for argument's sake.
Maybe it's a lesson that smart doesn't go as far as we think it would. Domain knowledge matters. (And going back to that third-party and your troll friend, maybe that is why it's not so nice being managed by a non-technical person.)
That's a silly argument. The people crushing it on a downhill aren't using their brakes. I road/raced on rim brakes for decades and brakes were my least concern.
After riding a mountain bike with disk brakes, I couldn't wait to get a road bike with disk brakes.
> Then Why Did We Get Them?
Because they're better. Full stop. I can stop faster with less effort.
> Rim Brakes Are Better For Most Riders Most Of The Time
I don't need any brakes at all most of the time either, but when I need them I really need them.
And not to mention how much effortless it is to apply the brakes compared to cable brakes where there's friction within the cable hose.
I can't go back to cable brakes after using disc brakes. Even for normal grocery trips. Nothing recreational.
I only choose cable discs on bikes I use extremely rarely (i.e. I keep one at my inlaws for when I visit once or twice a year and I wouldn't want to deal with hydraulics maintenance in that context).
None of that is true.
Frame/axle changes also apply to calliper brakes and really any part that attaches to the bike.
You can get cable actuated disc brakes that don't require any professional servicing. But if you do go with say 4 piston hydraulic then you get significantly better braking performance. Which if you're doing bike packing, touring, mountain biking etc is a huge benefit.
Also of all the things in your bike cheapening out on brakes is stupid. It can be the difference between life and death.
I would never buy or build a full size full time bike that doesn’t have at least mechanical discs. It is a no brainer. Full stop. (Heh, get it???)
The four pots on my cargo bike can stop me, another adult, and itself (200kg or so) in what feels like 5 feet from 20mph. They are powerful enough that when I first got it I had to stop myself from pulling the levers so hard, cause I’d skid with barely any effort. Such a bike would be impossible with rims.
There’s being romantic about old bikes and old, simpler tech, but this is just dumb.
But rim brakes don't just suck to use. They're also a fundamentally flawed design from an engineering/maintenance perspective.
Rim brakes repurpose the rim itself as the braking surface. Yeah - the structural element holding the tire bead in place is also the surface to which you apply massive heat and friction. Millimeters away from your cloth and rubber tire. Who even thought of this design? A misaligned brake pad can rub directly on the tire and puncture it. Grit in the brake pads can destroy the rim causing it to release the tire bead. Heat can cook your tire sealant and cause punctures. The materials and shape of the rim are limited to what can support a flat metal braking surface. If the wheel is out of true, your brakes rub. There are so many problems that stem directly from using the rim as a braking surface. It's just a bad design.
* Mountain bikes are better with them. I hate the low tolerances in terms of adjusting the damn things though.
* I guess they're better with carbon rims on road bikes?
* But the 'limiting factor' in stopping a road bike in most cases is the road/tire contact patch, not the brakes. I can lock up a road bike just fine with caliper brakes.
Carbon rims are becoming more popular across cycling not just on road.
They are stronger, lighter, less fragile and the quality is improving such that I bought a pair with a lifetime warranty.
And carbon rims are worse than aluminium with calliper brakes especially in wet weather conditions.
I'm less convinced about road bikes though.
No mistake, disc brakes offer better braking power and a superior braking experience to rim brakes but the difference is nowhere as big as it used to be.
Rim brakes are not better for most riders most of the time. Hydraulic disc brakes deliver superior braking power, better modulation, are safer, lighter, and more reliable. Braking power in particular is very important to regular people who just want to ride their bike and use their brakes without needing death grip forearms.
The guy sounds like a super bike snob. He even knows that rim brakes are unsafe in the rain and he just dismisses that for no reason.
> The weight penalty incurred when adopting disc brakes is in the order of 750g to 1kg
No need to get emotional over this stuff, I love my hydraulic discs but they are heavier at comparable price points. It's also not particularly important to have a bike weigh a bit more, I was just letting the OC know that he was wrong on that aspect.
So to add it all up you’re looking at 770g in components/additions, offset by 75g skewers, 310g calipers, and an added 25g or so per rim for the brake track. So discs are naively something like +335g. I obviously agree it’s a heavier system, but I don’t think ballparking the penalty as triple what it actually is is reasonable.
Well, he is the writer of bikesnobnyc, so yes.
I’ll never go back to rim brakes now that I’ve had discs. I still use my rim brake bikes for clear weather around town. For real work it is discs every single time.
The author seems to have only used bicycles in optimal conditions.
I have road and mountain bikes with rim brakes (grew up with them), disc brakes, and a 4kW scooter with disc brakes and regenerative braking.
Disc brakes are high maintenance: oil (leaks and water content), pads, and springs.
Rim brakes are more-or-less maintenance-free except cleaning the rims maybe every year or 2, and pads every 5-10 years. Only rarely alignment.
The mechanical advantage and safety is theoretically better with rim brakes because the forces are much higher in disc brakes due to the differences in lever distance.
Wow your rim brakes don't use pads?
I've found disc brakes to be so much less hassle than rim brakes - you just remove the retaining pin, spread the pads, take out old pads, drop in new pads, re-insert retaining pin, pump the lever a few times, done.
All in all its a few minute job and less time consuming than swapping rim pads and adjusting toe in. Riding in wet conditions with sintered disc pads results in less frequent pad change than with rim brakes.
And its certainly much less time consuming than re-lacing a wheel like I used to do once the rim was worn through from rim brakes.
Damn, I wish I had that maintenance pattern with them. For me, cleaning the rims and shoes was a daily requirement during the rainy/muddy season, a set of pads would last me about a year, and the alignment needed adjustment every few months.
With disc brakes, I've needed none of that aside from alignment. I have needed to adjust the alignment every so often, but that's not that big of a deal.
They have their downsides, certainly, but overall I prefer them.
As sonmeone else pointed out, disc brakes let you use wider tires which give you a smoother more comfortable ride whether you're riding a road bike or a commuter bike. Also disc brakes automatically adjust for pad wear so there's less fiddling around once the disc brakes are initially set up.
- rim brakes are easier to maintain. Disc brake DIY maintenance required equipment and expertise beyond most riders.
- rim brakes are more than adequate for the riding the average avid cyclist does.
- A rim brake bike that has been sitting in the garage needs little TLC and service to get back in service, in contrast to a much more expensive and time-consuming effort to get a hydraulic disc back in service.
- rim brakes create torque at beefier parts of the frame (where they are mounted) than at the end of the fork and end of the chain-stays and seat-stays
There is no question a quality disc brake is better at braking than its rim brake counterpart. But generally it was a solution in search of a problem and makes cycling even more out of reach for most consumers despite the industry lamenting for decades that ridership was flat despite a growing population.
Seriously. If you're bikepacking long distances or in remote areas and you're running rim brakes because they're repairable on-trail or with basic tools and every shop has parts, that's reasonable.
This article is nonsense.
I need to add that i never had any issues with my rim brakes while descending long mountain downhill.. it may brake a bit less than the disc brakes when wet but i just need to make careful and anticipate my braking more... but it's raining so I should make careful anyway!!!!
(context: i am a old grumpy european cyclist who lives by the alpes and does around 5/7k of road cycling a year for the last 10/15 years)
Okay, ready for a new idea I just thought of? Hydraulic rim brakes. They are built into either side of the fork and push bigger pads into deep carbon wheel surfaces for as much braking power as you want, with the torques applied to the strongest points of the wheel and frame, and no twisting moment applied to the spokes.
He also seems to be a grouchy whiner about other things, like mountain bikes, suspension, hydraulic brakes, and even one finger braking...
Probably only rides alone.
This is patently false. Mountain bikes have been running tires over twice as wide on rim brakes for decades. I had one growing up in the 90s. Perhaps you mean caliper brakes? Even if so, I currently run 700x28c on my 10yo racing bike, I don't think I'd have any trouble going up a size or two.
Other rim brake assembly types can fit more, but those are even less common on modern road groupsets.
Between 2015 and 2020 we came back on skinny tires and wanted more than 28mm. This was the same time road cycling moved to disc brakes. Most bikes with rim brakes are still using calipers, cantilevers are not coming back. If you want more than 28mm, you will want disc brakes.
Yes, that's one of the benefits of disc brakes, the "better modulation" you hear about equates to finer control and not locking up the brakes.
In the end disc brakes bikes are everywhere for the same reason 2 tons SUV are everywhere. It does not have much to do with real needs or actual real-world performance with skilled operators, sadly...
A better thought is: since disc brakes were made legal 5 years ago, how many teams remained on rim brakes? the answer is almost none.
And this doesn't get into things that matter for normal riding like the fact your rims don't need replacing from wear, they aren't impacted by wet weather, the better modulation, etc.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with a road bike with rim brakes on it.
But so long as they’re set up properly, discs are also nice - and far more confidence inspiring.
But I hate having yet another electronic device in my life that I have to keep charged up.
I could be a Luddite, but maybe I'm just a traditionalist.
Yes, an hydraulic disc brake system is (still) more expensive than a set of rim brakes, and I guess the difference is bigger for road bicycle ones.
But disk bike pads now are in many cases even cheaper than rim brake pads - and they can last longer.
In my use case, disc brakes are way less prone to dis-alignment compared to rim brakes - and hence less prone to unnecessary wear and reduction of the cyclist's performance. And conversely, disc brakes won't be affected if the rim is not completely true for whatever reason.
And - most importantly - disc brakes don't wear the rim at all but an inexpensive rotor that lasts much longer in comparison. In my case, having to replace both rims on my commuter each 3 years or so was no joke - the first time I ignored the serious wear they had until they comically bent a bit when going over a dirty road - and fortunately nothing happened to me, as there have been cases when they make people crash due to their sudden breakage.
I've done a lot of bike building, repair, maintenance, and comparisons, particularly in the last few years.
Up until 2000 or so, disc brakes did not exist for bicycles in a meaningful way. They were very popular on motorcycles, trains, and automobiles, largely because they provide stopping power for longer than the previous popular technology, drum brakes. And because they are arguably more maintainable than drum brakes, which are allegedly a pain in the ass to work on. Automobiles mostly moved to discs by the 50s or so; trains moved even earlier.
Bikes, on the other hand, had two (or three) competing brake systems prior to the 2000s. The most popular by far worldwide is rim brakes, the familiar clamping system that rubs pads on the rim of the wheel. These work great, are easy to maintain, and easy to fix when something goes wrong. Their biggest downside is wet, and even moreso muddy conditions, which can significantly reduce braking power when crap gets between the pad and the rim. And older cantilever brakes are really really tricky to set up, especially if you don't do it much. The 90s saw a significant improvement here with the development of Shimano's V-brake, which simplified rim brake tweaking to the point where basically anyone could do it.
V-brakes are essentially "good enough for anyone". But racers drive the bicycle part industry. Competition leads to the constant drive for new parts; companies sponsor top racers to get their parts on display at racing events; non-pro racers across the USA spend millions of dollars per year chasing incremental gains with these upgrades.
So racers moved to disc brakes. They were initially really heavy (they require attachment points and pad hardware that's much more substantial than the rim brake equivalents), really expensive, and not much of an improvement over rim brakes. Eventually folks figured out that hydraulic brakes (which use tubes filled with mineral oil instead of cables for actuation) could provide extra stopping power with less effort. And so all racing bikes adopted hydraulic disc brakes in the early 2010s.
Unfortunately, everything in the bike industry chases racing fads. There are only a couple of major parts manufacturers (shimano and SRAM) that make complete sets of brakes, drivetrains, and levers. This is changing with the recent growing popularity of brands like microShift, but most frame manufacturers have existing relationships with shimano and SRAM -- picture something like the Qualcomm domination in the smartphone SoC industry. And since those two big brands build racing and racing-inspired equipment, that's what we all get.
Most commuters do not need hydraulic disc brakes. They are an expensive luxury; there's no denying the stopping power is superior, but you don't need it if you're riding at 10-20mph across town to get to your job or pick up some groceries. As other commenters have pointed out, you're also fucked if something happens to one of your brake lines (aka oil filled tubes) because it's nearly impossible to fix on the road. That's a big downside!
Anyway, sorry for the rant -- the discussion here just really ground my gears because it's so similar to the flaws I see with our community when folks talk about technology or even finance: people don't acknowledge that there's context (and personal preference) involved with picking the right tool for the job.
Disc brakes are kind of like Kubernetes: great for heavy workloads, occasionally a pain, but overkill for the lighter workloads unless you enjoy geeking out (that's the personal preference bit). Rim brakes are more like running something on a Raspberry Pi: dumb for heavy workloads, but often a good price:performance ratio for lighter workloads.
I wish folks in our community would have a little more empathy and mutual understanding instead of constantly insisting that they're correct. I feel like HN used to be better about this, but I think this behaviour has crept in more and more since Reddit self-immolated.