“Is there a All-In-One Bike?” discussion

Question

I don't like this question which says:

Is there a bike, which contains all the qualities in one?

Like, uphill, downhill, speed, road, trailer, lightweight, heavy duty, tough.

Instead of having a debate in comments on the main site, I thought we'd be better off here on Meta.

1. The only possible answer to this question is "no", and that is obvious. No one will benefit from that question-and-answer.

2. I don't believe the person asking this question was really curious. They may wish for an all-in-one bike, or their domestic partner may wish they only had one bike, but they don't really wonder whether such a beast exists, or maybe they're just fishing for reputation points.

3. The question is quite vague.

For contrast, here are some more specific questions, that might actually be useful to someone:

"how can I set up my road bike so I can safely ride it down a steep dirt path?" (since I want to spontaneously ride somewhere that looks fun)

"how can I set up my mountain bike to be more efficient on the road" (since I ride on the road to get to my favorite off-road area)

"how can I set up a bike to work equally well for up-hill and down-hill off-road?"

"How can I set up my bike to be as fast as possible on my commute to work?" (because I'm a speed demon and my only chance to ride is while commuting)

Answer 1

Thanks for starting this discussion...

I like the question, because it's one almost every cyclist has wondered about. Especially when starting out, it's tempting to think that if you had enough money and knew what the experts knew, you could find that perfect bike which does everything well.

The short answer of course is: "it doesn't exist". But by asking it you find out more about the trade-offs and can make your next bike selection more easily. And now that it's been asked and out the way, duplicates can be quickly closed.

The revised questions proposed by Jay are even better but probably aren't on the new cyclist's radar until the basic one has been answered. Feel free to ask them!

Answer 2

I don't like the question either. I totally agree that it's so broad as to be almost meaningless ... but the answers are quite good.

Thus I am inclined to leave it.

One of the "chaos factors" of Q&A -- in my experience, anyway -- is that there is no exact way to judge whether a question is ultimately bad or good solely based on the question itself. The first few answers set the tone and that largely depends on the quality of the first few answers, and that in turn depends on who sees and answers the question first.

We only have the following guidelines:

• http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/
• http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/real-questions-have-answers/

And this question does not do well by any of them except those that judge the resulting answers.

So, apparently here on bicycles we have a rather high quality set of answerers. :)