This review of a few  ”Dutch-style” bicycles isn’t the most informed you’ll find, but in fairness it is written for a general audience and the author isn’t an expert. You’ll often such bicycles disparged by fairly informed bicycle people for their supposed performance disadvantages–they’re heavy, the upright riding position doesn’t allow the rider to use the largest pedaling muscles and also makes out of the saddle efforts awkward. Privileging the metrics of efficiency and speed is fine in some case but doing so in all cases doesn’t take into account the use of the bicycles. Bicycles are tools, and a performance bicycle is one perfectly suited to the particular use of the rider.

The Slate review ascribes the bias against city bikes to a different source.

Slate‘s D.C. office is full of commuting cyclists, so I lent the Batavus out to a few of them and asked their impressions. They all acknowledged the bike’s evident craftsmanship and the lushness of its ride. But there seemed to be a philosophical stumbling block that prevented them from fully enjoying their time with it.

It turns out my colleagues view urban cycling as a Darwinian contest, in which the cyclist who weaves most daringly between the delivery trucks is the glorious victor. Thus they chafe at the configuration of the Batavus, which does not encourage or enable aggressive pedaling. I, on the other hand, like to pretend I’m a European—rolling around the city at dawdling speed, occasionally dinging the bell to alert inattentive pedestrians to my presence. If you’re like me, you’ll adore the Batavus. If you approach cycling as a vicious blood sport, you likely won’t.

While a little unfair and hyperbolic, I think there’s something to this. There are other reasons for the bias toward sport and recreation class bicycles, to be sure (one being that in a typical bike shop there are no bicycles outside of the sport and recreation class), but the sport and rec bicycle has so skewed our sense of what a bike should be that even in such strongholds of self-styled practical cyclists like the I-BOB list city bikes are routinely disparaged and deemed unsuitable for the North American rider.

Depending on several particulars, the best bicycle for transportation will either be a Dutch style city bike, a randonneuring bicycle, a cargo bike, or a folding bicycle. I’ll go over those particulars and how to choose the best bicycle for transportation in a separate post. And I’ll probably need another to address the typical objections to city bikes, which I think are perfectly valid for some places and uses, but clearly wrongheaded in others. Still, the Slate rider is onto something. In the US when people talk about a practical bicycle they are largely still referring to a practicalroad bicycle in the sport and recreation class with a few practical additions (fenders, lights, racks, etc). Think something like a Rivendell, a French style porteur, or rando bike. While none of these are racing bicycles, they are still bicycles on which a fit person can show up at a club ride and keep up with the vase majority of spandex clad weekend warriors on racing bicycles. Sure you’re on a funny, heavy bike by the standards of most but whose gonna poke fun at you if you can’t be dropped? If you can keep up, you’re in the figurative club. But on a city bike you’re unlikely to keep up with anything but the slowest group on club rides–not that you’d take such a bike to a club ride, but the way that road bicycles define performance comes down to speed, and this performance metric poses a hurdle for many US riders–even those who don’t consider cycling a “vicious blood sport” when choosing a transportation bicycle.