After over two decades, Surly moved the Cross-Check frameset from their standard lineup of bikes to the ‘Legacy Lineup’ of their website. Surly confirmed that the bike is no longer in production and is unlikely to come back.
If you haven’t owned this gravel/cyclocross/touring/whatever bike yourself, you likely know someone who has. The Surly Cross-Check was the egalitarian choice in cycling, simultaneously someone’s utilitarian dream bike that was attainable and sold at a fair price.
The end of the Cross-Check marks the bike’s reign as the most bike that ever biked, the go-to way to make a pile of parts you hoarded in the corner of your garage into a functioning bicycle, and the defacto option that a bike nerd could happily ride and recommend to their non-bikey friends all the same.
Overrated: front derailleurs and how many people need more than 5 gears, anyway?
Underrated: cargo racks. People should have to go out of their way to buy a bike that can’t carry stuff, not the other way around. Imagine having to retrofit all your jackets with pockets.
@schizanon@cycling
Most overrated? Carbon. It’s brittle, has a really unfavorable failure mode, and can’t be recycled at end of life.
Aero-everything. Just like being obsessed with a bike’s weight, aero on the bike is marginal gains for most people, and it has really negative effects on the feel/comfort of those bikes too.