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FixedGearGallery.com - the Bay Area hipster's paradise

Whenever you cruise through the streets of downtown San Francisco you can’t help but see hipsters huffing up hills on fixed gear roadies. Of all the places where fixed gear bikes wouldn’t take off, I would have thought it would be San Francisco because of the hills. But despite all odds, it has. And whether or not you are a hipster in SF trying to look cool, FixedGearGallery.com is the place to go drool over the cool bikes others have posted (I’ve added a couple to this post — go to FixedGearGallery.com for many, many more). A true fixed gear bike has a direct connection between your legs and the speed of the bike — no coasting. So if you are going faster, you have to keep your legs turning. If you are going slower, you pedal slower. Slowing down means using your legs to resist the inertia of the back tire — emergency stops are made by locking your legs to make the back tire skid. In fact, the original fixed gear bikes were strictly for riding track — no brakes, no gears. So to slow down, you just had to slow it down with the speed of your leg movements. But many say that expert roadies started taking track bikes out on the road because it helped them smooth out their pedaling. And from there who knows how it spiked as a trend in SF, but it has definitely been strong for a few years now. It’s become so popular in fact, that Kona came out with a fixed gear road bike this year called the Paddy Wagon — and it is really pretty...Read more...

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