Flat vs Clipless Pedals for Bikepacking: The 60% Myth

Search for bikepacking pedals and you will meet the same sentence over and over: roughly 60% of bikepackers prefer flat pedals, according to a survey by BIKEPACKING.com. It turns up in blog posts, in forum replies, and in the AI summaries that increasingly sit above both.

We went to find that survey, because a number that specific ought to have a method behind it.

It does not exist. The article everyone is pointing at is a 2022 editors’ roundup, and it publishes no percentage at all. What it actually says is that flat pedals were “generally more favored” among “20 or so respondents”, and its nine named contributors split six flats to three clipless. Somewhere downstream a soft preference among twenty people hardened into a percentage, the percentage acquired a survey it never had, and the whole thing became a fact about the sport. We cannot tell you exactly where the 60% was minted — and we are not going to invent a chain of custody for it, because inventing plausible numbers is the thing this article is complaining about.

That is a shame, because the real counts are more interesting than the invented one — and they do not say what the myth says.

What riders are actually on

Four published counts exist for bikepacking races, all of them from rider-submitted rigs. Here they are as published, with nothing smoothed.

Field	Rigs	Clipless	Dual-sided	Flat
Tour Divide 2026	100	73	not stated — “a handful”	20
Tour Divide 2025	116	72%	8%	~20%
Tour Divide 2024	100	73	11	16
Colorado Trail Race 2024	40	28	1	11

Clipless wins the race fields, and it is not close. Between 72 and 73 percent of the riders who submitted a rig to a Tour Divide were on clipless-only pedals, three years running — and that is a count of the people who filled in a form, not of everyone on the start line. Count the dual-sided pedals as clipped-in too and the 2024 figure rises to 84%.

If you have been told bikepackers prefer flats, that table is the first problem with it. Here is the second, and it is the one worth reading twice.

The largest survey is not a race, and it picks a third option

Every count above is of people racing. That is a specific and slightly strange population to generalise from — self-selected, fitness-focused, and riding the fastest thing they can afford. Most people reading this are not racing the Divide.

The largest reader survey we could find of touring and bikepacking riders who are not racing is a German-language one that has run at intervals for a decade. It is self-selected like everything else here, so treat it as the biggest available sample rather than a representative slice of the sport. Its 2025 edition drew 518 respondents, and it does not agree with the race data or the myth:

Pedal type	Share	Change since 2022
Dual-sided (flat one side, clip the other)	50%	+10 points
Clipless only	~38–39%	+7 points
Flat only	~11–12%	−2 points

Half of them are on a pedal with a flat face on one side and a clip mechanism on the other, and it is the fastest-growing of the three, though not by much — clipless gained seven points over the same period. Pure flats are last, and the only one of the three that went backwards.

Two honesty notes on that table, because it is more interesting than the table. The survey’s text states the 50% and all three of the changes outright. It does not state the other two shares in words — those live in the survey’s chart, and two readings of that chart differ by a point, which is why they appear above as ranges rather than as figures. We would rather print a range we can stand behind than a decimal we cannot.

The survey is also German-language and draws a German-speaking readership, where dual-sided touring pedals have been a normal fitment for decades. That is a real caveat on how far it travels: it is strong evidence about touring riders, and weaker evidence about American ones.

So in every population anyone has counted in numbers — racers and tourers both — pure flat pedals come last. The majority is clipless if you are racing, and dual-sided if you are not.

There is exactly one place flats lead, and it is worth naming because it is where this whole argument started: that 2022 editors’ panel, where nine hand-picked contributors went six to three for flats. Nine people chosen by an editor is the weakest evidence in this article. It is also, as far as we can tell, the origin of the statistic the entire internet now repeats as though it were a survey of the sport.

The efficiency argument is the weakest reason to clip in

Here is where it gets awkward for the received wisdom, because the single most common reason given for clipping in is the one with the most evidence against it.

The claim is that being attached lets you pull up through the upstroke and therefore ride more efficiently. Two studies test it directly:

• Mornieux, Stapelfeldt, Gollhofer & Belli (2008), International Journal of Sports Medicine 29:817–822. Eight elite cyclists and seven non-cyclists at 90 rpm and 60% of maximal aerobic power. Between platform pedals and clipless there was no significant difference in pedalling effectiveness, net mechanical efficiency, or muscle activity. When riders were coached to actively pull up, effectiveness rose sharply and net mechanical efficiency fell.
• Straw & Kram (2016), Footwear Science 8(1). Running shoes on flat pedals, running shoes with toe clips, and cycling shoes with clipless pedals, measured at 50, 100 and 150 W. No significant difference in metabolic cost between any of the three.

Pulling up makes the numbers on a pedal sensor look better while making the rider burn more energy for the same output. It is a technique that improves the metric and not the ride.

Both studies are limited to steady submaximal effort, and that limit matters: sprint and maximal-power research does show a clipless advantage. But bikepacking is close to the definition of steady submaximal effort. You are not sprinting a loaded bike over the Divide. Even the analyst who counted 87% clip-in at the 2024 Tour Divide draws the same conclusion himself — the benefit lives in acceleration, so on a route like that one there is probably no meaningful speed difference between the two systems.

If you ride flats and someone tells you that you are giving up efficiency on a loaded multi-day tour, the literature is on your side.

A pattern we went looking for and could not find

The obvious hypothesis is that rougher routes with more hike-a-bike push riders onto flats. The Colorado Trail Race is high-altitude singletrack with sustained sections of pushing, and sure enough its flat-pedal share is the highest in the table: 11 of 40 rigs, or 27.5%, against 18.7% pooled across three Tour Divides.

That looks like a finding. Run a significance test on it, though, and it evaporates: a Fisher exact test returns p of about 0.21, and with only 40 rigs the Wilson confidence interval on that 27.5% runs from 16.1% to 42.8% — wide enough to swallow the Tour Divide figure whole. The 2025 Colorado Trail Race write-up publishes no pedal breakdown, so there is no second year to strengthen it with.

It may well be true. One under-powered year is not evidence that it is, so we are not going to tell you it is.

What the evidence cannot settle

Three things get asserted constantly in this argument with nothing behind them, and you should discount all three when you read them elsewhere:

• That flats are more dangerous. US emergency-department data covering 2013–2022 and 2,543 mountain-biking cases does find that a foot slipping off the pedal produces the highest rate of lower-extremity injury of any mechanism. But that dataset does not record pedal type, so it cannot compare flats against clipless at all. In fairness, the study’s own authors do float clipless pedals as a prevention idea — but they float it, they did not measure it. It is not evidence in either direction, and it gets cited as though it were.
• That routes involve enough hike-a-bike to decide it. No route-wide hike-a-bike figure has been published for the Tour Divide. Individual Silk Road Mountain Race accounts describe around 20 km early on and a 15 km carry over a pass, but those are one rider’s memory of one year, not a measurement of the route.
• That people try dual-sided pedals and give up on them. Nothing found in either direction. The only trend data available points the other way: up ten points in three years.

And one structural caveat about everything above. Outside that 518-person touring survey, every count in this article comes from riders who volunteered their bike to one website. That is a self-selected sample of people engaged enough to fill in a rig form, and the two published analyses of the Tour Divide field are not independent of each other — the second draws on the first’s rig posts. Fold the 11 hybrids from 2024 into the clip-in column and that year’s 73% becomes 84%, which lands within three points of the 87% the other analysis reports. The apparent disagreement between those two numbers is a filing decision about dual-sided pedals, not a conflict in the data.

So which should you ride

Honestly: whichever you prefer. That sounds like a dodge, and in most articles it is. Here it is the conclusion the evidence forces, and it is worth being precise about why.

Preference would not be the right basis for this decision if one system made you meaningfully more efficient on a loaded multi-day ride. That is the claim that would override taste, it is the claim most of the clipless orthodoxy rests on, and at bikepacking intensities it does not hold up.

Be precise about what that does and does not settle, though. What the two studies retire is the metabolic efficiency argument, in a lab, at steady power. They say nothing about foot control on a rough descent, about how either system feels in hour eleven, about getting a foot down in a rock garden, or about sprinting away from a dog. Those are real and the research does not touch them. What it removes is the one argument that claimed to be objective — and with that gone, what remains are trade-offs with no universal winner, which personal fit is exactly the right way to settle.

What should go into that preference:

• How much you expect to walk. Not just hike-a-bike: town stops, resupply, camp chores, a scramble to a viewpoint. Cleated soles are unpleasant to walk any distance in, and the alternative is carrying a second pair of shoes.
• Cold and wet. Flats let you wear a proper insulated boot, which flexes and keeps your feet warmer than a stiff cycling shoe. Mud and snow can pack into a cleat and make engagement difficult.
• Distance from a bike shop. Cleats and their bolts are consumables that wear and clog; experienced Divide riders carry spares for exactly that reason. A flat pedal can still cook a bearing, but there is no proprietary part on it you need to be carrying a spare of.
• Foot pain history. If you already ride cleats and get forefoot pain, cleat position is a real lever: a clinical series of 21 cyclists with pedalling-related forefoot pain and forward-set cleats improved after the cleats were moved rearward. Note what that does and does not say — it is evidence that cleat position is adjustable, not evidence that clipless beats flats for sore feet. On flats you chase the same problem with shoe stiffness and foot placement instead.
• Shin tolerance. Pedal pins bite when your foot slips, and the resulting mess is the most common complaint about flats. Shorter pins reduce it at some cost in grip.
• What dual-sided costs you. It is heavier than either pure design, its flat face is smaller and less grippy than a real platform, and you have to flip the pedal to find the side you want. It is a compromise, and it compromises — we have found no evidence either way on whether riders stay with them.

The pedals we hold verified specs for

Four, with price and weight read off the maker’s own page rather than a retailer’s. Weights are per pair, which is how pedals are published and how you buy them.

• Dual-sided: Crankbrothers Double Shot 3 — 403 g, and the heaviest here precisely because it carries two mechanisms. Eight adjustable pins on the flat face, so that side is a real platform rather than the back of a clip pedal.
• Flats, cheap: OneUp Composite — 355 g, 115 x 105 mm, and the least expensive way to find out whether flats suit you before spending real money.
• Flats, serviceable: OneUp Aluminum — 386 g, same platform in a machined body you can take apart, which is the argument on a long route.
• Clip-in: Crankbrothers Candy 2 — 355 g, with enough alloy body around the mechanism to ride unclipped through a rough section.

A gap worth naming, because it is the obvious one: Shimano is missing. Shimano makes the dual-sided pedals most touring riders actually run — the PD-EH500, the T8000, the M324 — and they belong in that list. Their site returns a 403 to us, so nobody here has read those figures off Shimano’s own page, and we are not going to transcribe them from a retailer and call them verified. They go in when somebody checks them in a browser.

What should not go into it: that clipping in will make you more efficient, that flats will get you hurt, or that 60% of bikepackers have already settled this. None of those survive a look at the sources.

And if you want the answer the largest non-racing survey actually gives, it is neither of the two things people argue about. It is the dual-sided pedal — flat face for the rough day, the walk and the town stop, clip face for the long road drag. Half of those 518 riders landed there, ten points more of them than three years earlier.

The rider counts in this article are current as of the 2026 Tour Divide field and the 2025 touring survey. Figures for the 2025 Tour Divide are published as percentages rather than counts, and the pooled flat-pedal share above applies those percentages to the stated sample of 116. We do not field-test pedals, and nothing here is a durability verdict on any model.