Man! You guys are a bunch of complainers! I second the get-an appropriate bike line of thinking. I have a basic CX bike with a steel fork and wider tires. Riding on gravel or dirt roads isn't as fast as paved roads, but I'd hardly call it torture.
Growing up in Oregon, at a certain point I'd ridden all the roads what seemed like a million times, so my friends and I started seeking out gravel roads that were relatively smooth. We put together some epic rides on those, on our road bikes.
This was always one of my favorite climbs when going on rides from Padova:
Why shouldn't we spend some money to pave a bike path that could be well used. When I rode on the bayshore pathway, there were parts of the path that had been partially washed out, leaving about 3 feet of 2-5 inch ruts. Elsewhere there were infrequent, but pretty much constant 1 inch ruts in hard packed dirt. Elsewhere they had filled the path with a softpacked pea-gravel. You shouldn't have to break out a mountainbike and deal with drastically changing road surfaces to commute to work.
> Man! You guys are a bunch of complainers! I second the get-an appropriate bike line of thinking.
This line of thinking got us fleets of gas guzzling SUVs and crumbling infrastructure because people didn't want to pay their road taxes after buying too much car.
