Giving up on SPDs

[laura*]

You could always get those double sided ones with the clips on one side and the platforms on the other.

That's what I have now. I use the bike in question for commuting and errands and thus it must be rideable wearing regular sneakers.

On my commuter or bikes that I use platform pedals on, I use VP bear trap/cage pedals - you can get 'em on ebay in various fun colors, and you can hook toe clips to them (least they definitely have the holes to do it):

Oooh! Lots of color choices! OK, these are now on the list of possibilities.

Another alternative is to give up on any kind of attachment.

I climb up so many steep grades that I must be able to apply power on the upstroke. This means some sort of attachment. When using this bike for commuting, I'm terrified of dropping a foot off the front of a pedal while spinning out in top (MTB) gear racing a city bus to the next bus stop. This also calls for attachment.

The pedal is not balanced. It's guaranteed that when you want to put your toe in the cage, the cage will be flipped to the down side and you'll need to waste time flipping it around with your toe so you can get your foot in it.

I had toe clips for 19 years. This was rarely a problem.

Last but not least, if you are riding on the flat side of the pedal (don't want to be in the cage) with the cage on the downside....well.... any one ever notice all the broken bits of toes clips along the trail? They get caught on things, bounce off rocks, break, reduce clearance...

This was my primary motivator to trying clipless. Not so much for trail riding issues, but more for carving high speed turns on roads. My old toe clips were getting horribly scratched up from dragging on pavement when not clipped in.

Then the light went on - I didn't have to stay clipped if I didn't want to when hitting the gnarly stuff.

That's what I've been doing now - clipping out of the SPDs for the gnarly stuff. However, the resulting reduction of control makes the gnarlies even gnarlier.