Merida Crossway 300 2023

The Merida Crossway 300 is a comfortable, friendly barebones hybrid with a huge gear range, excellent equipment and a dependable ride, albeit a bit heavy. The lack of extras like mudguards and rack is niggling, but you can always choose better ones than ever get fitted as original equipment. And it's a great colour!

Maybe you don't like green, though… for more options, check out our guides to the best hybrid bikes and best commuter bikes.

> Buy now: Merida Crossway 300 for £885 from Tredz

Ride

This is the bit in a bike test where we usually go on about how stiff and responsive a bike is (if we're feeling really cliched we'll mention that it's laterally stiff and vertically compliant); it's where we talk about the alacrity with which it transforms effort into motion, about how it seems to just gambol and flounce up hills while remaining rock steady at 50mph on descents and just how downright exciting it is to ride.

Yeah, no. Not the Crossway 300.

Thing is, you don't want a practical flat-barred bike like this to be exciting. Fun, yes, and it is. Enjoyable, sure, that too. But let's save your actual sensations of excitement for featherweight carbon fibre speedsters. I want a bike like this to be solid, reassuring, wholesome, and friendly – and that's exactly what the Crossway 300 is.

This is a bike that goes where you point it without any fuss or hassle. In handling terms it Just Works™ and that's a very good thing.

The riding position is quite upright, which is nice for sitting and looking at the scenery, maybe less so for the dash to work. You can always fit a longer stem or tweak the bar position with the adjustable stem. You change the angle of the stem by just loosening and tightening one hex bolt, though major changes will require you to turn the handlebar too. I've seen lots of frankly dire implementations of this idea over the years, with stems that wouldn't tighten properly or that would come loose while riding, but the stem Merida has fitted here is problem free.

One downside compared to some rivals is that at almost 14kg it's quite heavy. The Boardman HYB 8.8 is 11.4kg and the Specialized Sirrus X 3.0 even lighter at 11.13kg. The Crossway 300's extra pork comes from the suspension fork and seatpost, and that adjustable stem. This blunts the Crossway 300's acceleration a little, though I don't expect a bike like this to respond like a carbon superbike anyway; but you're really going to notice it if you have to lug the Crossway 300 up the steps at a train station or over one of the bizarrely bike-hostile bridges that infest the National Cycle Network.

Tarmac is the natural home of a bike like this, but with its deep-treaded tyres and steady handling it works really well on trails too, as long as they're not rocky or muddy; my local bridleways and byways were ideal. There's plenty of room for fatter tyres too, up to 50mm, which means you could fit rubber from the skinnier end of the mountain bike range and tackle more technical trails, or go for gert big slicks for ultimate road comfort.

Frame

Pulling the Crossway 300 out of its box my first reaction was 'Ooh, pretty!' Sure, I'm shallow, but the shade of shimmering forest green Merida has landed on here is just NICE. There aren't enough green bikes around, in my opinion.

The green paint covers a frame welded from good old 6061 aluminium. People have been making bike frames from 6061 since at least the 1970s when Gary Klein built his first oversized frames. It's about as well studied as a bike frame material gets. Merida uses various forming processes to make it into butted and shaped tubes. Some joints also get a second pass of the welding torch to smooth them over, though on the Crossway 300 that prettification has only been done to the seat cluster. The other welds are nevertheless tidily stippled like TIG-welded joints should be.

The frame's well provided with attachment points for stuff – there are rack and mudguard eyes, two sets of bottle bosses, seatstay mounts for a frame lock, kickstand mounts and a pair of bolts under the top tube for a carrying a widget like the 76Projects Micro Piggy.

I'm always sceptical about suspension on hybrids. Cheap suspension forks and seatposts often add weight without bringing much function to the party, and there's no room in the budget of a £900 bike for a really good fork and post. However, the SR SunTour fork and Merida own-brand seatpost here do a fair job of taking the edge off potholes, and the way winter has trashed the roads round here, that's a welcome comfort improvement.

Components

The Crossway 300 has a collection of mountain bike components, or their trekking versions, centred on a triple chainset. That's a fairly unusual choice in 2023, but it seems triples are still popular in Merida's main markets in Europe.

With chainrings of 48, 36 and 26 teeth and an 11-34 cassette it provides a 570% gear range. That's huge! And the low gear of 26x34 (a ratio of 0.76, or 21 gear inches, or a development of 1.68m, depending on how you like your gears expressed – read more about that in our feature about bike gears) is as low as you'll find on anything but a mountain bike.

However, I see so many people on hybrids with triples grinding along in the big ring – even uphill – that I do wonder if an ultra-wide mountain bike setup with a single chainring wouldn't be a better idea for most. Shimano's Deore 12-speed system has a 510% gear range with just one gear shift control to operate. Merida uses it on the £1,000 Big Nine 80 mountain bike, with a better suspension fork than the Crossway 300's, so the cost of the 12-speed system shouldn't be a major blocker here.

> How to get ultra-low gearing

Stopping is handled by a basic but very functional pair of Tektro HD-M275 hydraulic disc brakes. They've a soft, easily modulated feel, plenty of stopping power and a reach-adjuster tucked away inside the lever.

Like Shimano's brakes, they use mineral oil. They also look a lot like some of Shimano's inexpensive brakes, to the point where you have to wonder who's manufacturing what for whom.

The Crossway 300 rolls on a pair of Merida's own wheels with in-house Comp TK rims on Shimano TX505 hubs. This is solid, dependable stuff. The rims are 20mm wide (internal) which boosts lateral strength, and the hubs have Shimano's classic cup-and-cone bearings which reward regular maintenance with long life.

They're shod with Maxxis Overdrive Excel tyres, which have a good balance of fairly low rolling resistance and fairly high beefiness from the thick tread and SilkShield anti-puncture layer in the casing. For night-time visibility they have reflective strips on the sidewalls. No visibility aid will help if a driver's just not paying attention, but it's got to be a good idea to help out the ones who are looking out for us.

Notably absent…

For a bike that's almost certainly going to get used for round-town transport, the Crossway 300 has some glaring absences: no mudguards, no rack, no lights, no lock – not even a kickstand. On the one hand, not fitting these accessories keeps the price down so the bike looks more attractive on the shop floor. On the other, a bike manufacturer can buy racks and mudguards in bulk for a lot less than your local bike shop, so if they're fitted at the factory the whole lot ends up costing less.

Read our guide to the best road bike mudguards to help you stay dry on wet rides.

With no practical accessories fitted here, you do at least get to choose the best options. I've never seen a bike factory-fitted with mudguards that offer the coverage of SKS Longboards, for example, or a rack that's compatible with a clip-on bag system like MIK or Topeak QuickTrack. With a naked bike, you have options.

> 15 easy ways to carry stuff on your bike

I'm also pleased to see mounts on the seatstays for a Dutch-style lock. Slap an Abus or Axa lock on there and it's always to hand when you need it.

Value

You've loads of choice in hybrids for around £900. For £850 there's the Boardman HYB 8.8 (currently on sale for £765), which Matt Lamy really liked and which has lost the silly one-piece bar and stem since we reviewed it; it's a bit sportier than the Crossway.

Speaking of sportier, Merida has the Speeder 200 with a double chainset and rigid fork and seatpost and that's another bike we've reviewed positively.

The versatile Escape 0 Disc from Giant has an rrp of £999 but can be found for £949; we gave it the Big Tick of a road.cc Recommends crest.

We liked the Specialized Sirrus X 3.0, too, though we thought it was expensive at £849; the good news is that you can now pick it up for £769.

Conclusions

With its triple chainset, suspension and adjustable stem, the Merida Crossway 300 is a high-end version of an old school take on the hybrid bike, but there's nothing wrong with that. This is a bike style that's been wildly popular over the last few decades since someone decided it was a good idea to combine the bar, gears and brakes of a mountain bike with the 700C wheels and skinny tyres of a road bike. It might be an old story, but in the Merida Crossway 300 it's well told.

Two significant downsides are the weight and the lack of practical extras. Neither are deal-breakers, just things to be aware of, and where the weight might matter most, on steep climbs, the super-low gearing compensates.

Part of me wishes the Crossway 300 came equipped, because I'd like to see more practical bikes out there, and manufacturers might then compete to see who can include the best mudguards, racks and so on. But since we don't live in my practical bike paradise, the lack here means that you can at least build the Crossway 300 into a terrific practical bike with top-flight mudguards, rack and lock.

Who should buy the Merida Crossway 300?

If you live somewhere hilly and want a round-town bike that'll do brilliant service as a weekend lane and easy-trail explorer as well, it's hard to go past the Merida Crossway 300 on the basis of its huge gear range alone. Be prepared to spend another £100-£150 on a rack, mudguards and frame lock to unleash its full practical potential.

That said, if the comfort-boosting suspension fork and seatpost don't matter to you, there are better bikes for the money.

Verdict

Dependable, friendly hybrid with comfort-boosting features and huge gear range, if a bit heavy