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I always get bullied for my fixie but it's just incredibly flat here and I have literally no reason to ever shift.
I down shift every time I slow down. Accelerating up to speed is easier and faster. And my gear ratio is higher than what would be practical on a fixie, meaning my top speed is higher.
Still, there is something to say for the simplicity of a fixie
I don't get the hate tbh, I'm nervous to ever ride one myself but you can get going SO FAST, and they're cheap and easy to maintain. I think people used to hate on brakeless ones as a hipster thing tho. I used to ride a single speed and had someone yell at me from their car something stupid because they thought it was fixed lol.
Fixies are fine, it's brakeless fixies that are bad which both the above picture and that entire subreddit are prime examples of.
You keep on rocking (unless...)
Wait brakeless????? That's just a bad idea. Who thought of that?
I'd argue it spread from NYC bike messengers originally and they did that because they had to use their own bikes for the job, at which point taking the bike with the lowest amount of maintenance needed (i.e., brakeless fixie) does make sense, materially.
That makes sense, but doesn't the skidding wear the tires much faster? And if your brakes break that doesn't stop you from delivering, you just don't have brakes now (until you're able to fix them) right?
That makes sense, but doesn't the skidding wear the tires much faster?
Sure, but if you weren't doing it for the culture you'd keep that shit to a minimun and try to go with the flow more. There's some other considerations here, bike theft, all the other parts of a brake that aren't a brake part and could go wrong etc. My point is mainly that it wasn't birthed from being real fucking dumb, but real fucking poor.
And if your brakes break that doesn't stop you from delivering, you just don't have brakes now (until you're able to fix them) right?
Well if you don't need them, why have them in the first place?