What is your lowest gear and how low is too low. Are new bikes geared too high?

[tyred]

Of my most used bikes, my touring bike conversion of a '90s MTB has 28/32.

My Viscount has 36/32, and I did plenty of life added touring with that, and found It adequate. It was before I smashed my leg and lost a lot of fitness all the same.

My Pioneer has 48/22 and a Sturmey hub.

My Brompton has 50/15 and a Sturmey hub. I've done loaded touring on this too. I might have to walk the odd hill, but not as many as I thought.

Old bikes often had crazy gearing. A typical rod braked roadster has gearing best suited to time trials, unless someone has fitted a bigger sprocket. My 1958 Raleigh Trent has four sped Cyclo-Benelux with a bottom gear of 63" which is a bit pointless. Only I like the novelty of having a bike with working Cycling gears, it would probably be better as a single speed. I'm not sure what brand they smoked around Nottingham back in the late '50s!

 

[Fastpedaller]

...


That's an incredible speed on that hill. Maybe some calibration needed...

70kph, perhaps.

[Edit: just checked, the KOM on the descent to Glossop is held by Ethan Hayter, 70kph average, max 90kph]

That's only about 42 MPH average (which, depending on how far in total, could seem feasible), but the top speed is about 54mph, which doesn't seem a lot for that hill - maybe it's flattened a bit since my ride about 35 years ago! I used to regularly get up to 50MPH on a hill in Essex, but the most I get to now I live in Norfolk is a sedate 32MPH.

 

[Dogtrousers]

Slightly off topic but I recall reading a piece about the early Tours de France. Back then gears were not allowed for the racers (sometimes even freewheels weren't allowed but the rules varied a lot) The result was that tourists could much more easily ascend the big climbs in their geared bikes to get to their vantage points than the poor racers could when they arrived.