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Full disclosure: I am the
editor of a literary almanac about bicycle commuting. Despite this fact,
however, I’m fairly convinced that bicycling—and a very particular niche
cycling market, in that—has finally and fully emerged as a complete mainstream
cultural clique here in the United
States.
I’m talking, of course,
about fixed-gear bicycles, straightforward bikes that (usually) have no gears
or brakes to speak of. “Fixies,” as they’re called, are controlled wholly by
pedaling forward or backward to go and to stop, respectively, since the rider
is in direct contact with the bike’s movement at any given moment (there is no
coasting on a fixie...ever). As such, these types of bikes are not only
extremely simplistic, but also elegantly reductive, a throwback to a time when
gears and brakes simply hadn’t been invented yet.
The infatuation with
fixed-gear bikes has been threatening to take off and become a full-on, well-established craze for some time now, but it’s finally official. A May 21 New
York Times blog even reported that a Berlin
art gallery has been dedicated to fixed-gear bikes alone. It’s possible, then,
that the bike—that hallmark of green transportation initiatives—is now as cool
as it is energy savvy. And not just in places like Portland,
Seattle, San Francisco,
and Boulder,
either; fixies are quickly become a ubiquitous part of any city scape.
As unsafe as they might
be—as I mentioned, few of them are fitted with brakes of any kind—fixies are
all the rage. And as going green gets more culturally acceptable (if not also
totally hip), it’s seems only natural that what was once a rebellious and
countercultural activity, bicycling has been reabsorbed by the mainstream and
is being marketed back to the masses.
As many critics have cited,
what’s so interesting about this biking phenomenon is that like LPs and
Ataris—other retro artifacts that are enjoying a second round of
attractiveness—these uncomplicated bicycles are not only becoming über
fashionable, they are also getting to be really, really expensive. And so
though not everyone rides a fixie (I don’t ride one, for example, because I’m
either too old already, or just too scared to ride one in traffic), there is
little doubt that their popularity (and price) won’t be diminishing anytime
soon.
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