I’m an absolute sucker for neat cables. When I build a bike for myself, when I know where I want my controls, I’ll make sure there isn’t an inch of extra hose or housing (allowances for handlebar bags excepted). I will go out of my way to tie or heat-shrink lengths together, even if it means disconnecting, trimming and refitting brake lines and cables. I love the aesthetics of a dialled cockpit, where everything is just so – to me, it’s indicative of the overall care and attention taken when pulling together a build.

You might think, then, that I would be all over the current headset routing trend like a rash. You would be wrong.

In an industry full of changing standards, vain trends, dubious new technology and infuriatingly amateur product design, this is still one of the worst things to happen in ages. In the endless pursuit of marginal aerodynamic gains to make road race bikes ‘faster’, cabling fully hidden from the wind was low-hanging fruit, especially enabled by the rise of wireless shifting. On race bikes, raced by elite athletes, in races, and maintained by race mechanics, it makes sense.

Where it doesn’t make sense is on endurance road bikes ridden slowly for hours on grimy, salty roads. On cyclocross bikes repeatedly jet-washed during muddy Cat 5 races and then shoved in the shed before dark. On electric MTBs getting thrashed weekend after weekend in typical UK conditions and then driven home from the trails on a tow bar rack. Thanks to the wonders of ‘trickle-down’, even entry-level bikes are now being designed this way – see the example below, priced at just over £1000, with its snake’s nest of cables all crammed through a tiny upper bearing and cover. What an absolutely insane design decision, unfortunately shared by an increasing number of brands, for an otherwise really nice bike aimed squarely at first-timers and Cycle To Work voucher users.

Do any of these examples benefit from a single watt power saving? No, they don’t. But the design concessions being made to facilitate this nonsense are awful. Upper bearing covers with huge holes in to allow cables (and water…) to pass through. Lines forced through tiny gaps and bent around tight corners – potentially fine for hydraulic hoses, but terrible for analogue cables where mechanical function is compromised. And what about a year down the line, when water has inevitably made its way in and things are feeling gritty? A headset bearing replacement used to be a quick, cheap 10-15 minute job: drop fork, clean parts, grease and fit new bearings, reassemble. Now the process involves cutting and bleeding brake lines and/or cables, and maybe even disconnecting electrical wires. Depending on just how terrible the routing is, this can be a multiple-hour, £100+ job. Same goes for hydraulic hose or cable replacements, which can now sometimes involve an almost complete tear-down of the front end, even down to the bar tape.

I don’t hate all internal cable routing. It can be both aesthetically pleasing and a pleasure to deal with, often a case of sticking a cable in one end and watching it pop out the other. Even non-guided frames can be nice to work on – recent Rocky Mountain and Pivot frames are good examples of how to do it right. But brands need to distinguish between ‘neat’ and ‘completely hidden’ – cables can still be neatly managed without needing to be invisible.

Really, it boils down to this: most consumers are now receiving an inferior product, with higher maintenance costs, purely for the sake of vanity. Why should the average person, who just bought their first proper bike, now be expected to pay more than 1/10th the value of that new bike a year later for what should be considered routine servicing? And why should we, as shop mechanics, have to justify this insanity and the service bills that come along with it?