i would watch this youtube channel
the mini velos look very cool!! i was drawn to them months ago before i started seriously considering bikes, i’ve seen them around DC and they look great for getting around a city that’s mostly flat. unfortunately being in the burbs now with some hi-speed roads near the house, and having what would likely be quite hilly use cases in DC proper (e.g. cutting across rock creek park, which is a river valley), i’m not sure they would be the best for me. i’m thinking more of something like a touring/road/randonneur bike type thing, with fenders and racks.
the rando bikes i find esp beautiful for some reason, like the geometry etc
imo go to a bike shop or something to figure out the kind of frame size/geometry you need (or i bet there’s some kind of table online you can look up and plug your leg/torso length into) and then just keep an eye on the second-hand market. i got my current bike from a buy nothing group and it’s marvellous
Thinking about all the extra rolling resistance I subjected myself to as a teen because I had to have a “mountain bike” with knobby tires, for the occasional dirt trail riding I did
I knew some hardcore bike jockeys that rode fixies in tallahassee in the late 2000s. You can manage some steep hills. You can hop and land on a pedal and lock the rear wheel.
I had this amazing purple banana seat that we found in the trash and my brother fixed up and fuckin hitting your pedals backwards and then Akira sliding was so fuckin badass, so I get the appeal, just not as an every day bike in SF, for me. I don’t have any say in what true biking sickos do I am merely an enthusiast
as i understand it fixed gear (e: as far as the recent craze) was sort of a bike messenger thing since they were poor and needed a bike that had a minimum of cost maintenance and breakable parts, and then it filtered upwards as a symbol of coolness
i think they’re neat despite the impracticality as someone in a hilly area
yeah there are real benefits to fixed gear bikes, mostly centered around the VASTLY lower cost of purchase and maintenance, your average geared bike by virtue of having to switch gears at all is more expensive because of both the wheel needing to accept geared cogs and also the shifting system itself needing maintenance…all of it is absolutely doable at a reasonable cost to an average person but when you compare it with a fixed gear bike it isn’t even close, the only thing you need to maintain is the chain and tires, which would both already need maintenance on a geared bike anyway
that said it is definitely not a mere coincidence that where they got the most popular was in flat dense cities, i think they actually got more popular in style when mash SF started making videos of fixie hill bombs and traffic weaving and stuff like that but that was them deliberately deciding to do that stuff on fixies
there’s this hilarious video saga of a bike youtube guy named zach gallardo where his channel’s whole thing is that he only rides fixed and he was going to do a bike tour down the california coast and everyone was like “dude maybe don’t do that,” he had some videos leading up to it, a few videos during the bike tour, then decided to quit and hilariously made a video called “5 crucial things nobody tells you about bike touring” and it’s like bro
wmata red line closed Bethesda station for (purple line) construction which mean I got to run down the longest escalator in the western hemisphere today, as a consolation prize for my trip to my dsa meeting being 1h20m
despite the impracticality as someone in a hilly area