Quote Originally Posted by withm View Post
Beautiful bike Tom. What is it?

My commute is 14miles 1 way - I've been using my Portland (more road bike style but with rack, fenders, drop bars, and disc brakes) which seems to be the perfect bike for the job. Oh, and I really like riding it too.

Martha
It's a Specialized Globe/City 7. Basically a hybrid frame with 700C wheels and 38mm slick tires. Triple chainring, 8-speed (11-32) cassette. Linear-pull V-brakes, fenders, and a rear rack rated for up to 100 pounds of stuff. It comes fully built-up on the LBS floor; it even comes with a bell.

One thing I really like about it is that it has a generator in the front hub, so when your wheels are turnin' your lights are burnin'. My first real commute on it two weeks ago involved a return trip through the downtown area in the dark, and I found that when you stop at a light (I've taken the LCI pledge not to run those things any more -- at least when someone else might be looking) the lights go out. So, I added a big battery-powered tail light set to the rear end of the rack, and moved the headlight set from the MTB that I had been using as my commuter over to this bike.

I'd been looking hard at a Portland, and may eventually move up to something like that, but I got an excellent deal on this one... a little less than half what it would cost me to order a Portland and build it up as a commuter/city bike.

So far, the Globe has been as good as it felt when I tried it out in the parking lot. I moved my rack trunk and occasionally my panniers over to it, and it's been a lot of fun. Not only is it nice to have a place to carry stuff other than in my jersey pockets, but I've made a point of riding it strictly in street clothes. Not to mention that it's been fun catching and dropping a lot of the local road/recreational riders with it ;-)