well this guy is using shoes as brakes so you must think shoes are bourgeois decadence

pedals without shoes hurts like a motherfucker though. Also good chance of deleting your toes. You cannot possibly proclaim toes to be burgeiouse decadence, checkmate!

I’ve not ridden one because no freewheel seems dumb to me but considering how different a derailleur feels to internal gearing I am forced to admit they’re probably onto something with the vibes of riding one.

I can also admit I ride much more with the flow on a singlespeed and they got that going for them.

I dunno why you’d ride a brakeless one. That one seems like dumb macho stuff

don’t even talk to me unless your feet look like this

it’s called opsec sweaty

I decide to go on one posting spree and of course i fucking flub it. Head empty, no thoughts. Straight bimbo (bicycle + himbo)

no, I will just become 8bicycles eventually

yeah you do if you got brakes

no self-respecting fixie-rider would ever be seen with any tread on their tyres

This one doesn’t. Fixed Gear just means there’s no freewheel, i.e. the rear wheel is directly connected to the pedals via the chain. You pedal backwards, you go slower (or skid, or go backwards).

You can absolutely have a fixed gear bicycle with brakes.

But there is quite some popularity around running a fixed gear bicycles with no brakes because, as mentioned above, it kind of has a coaster brake type deal built into it. The dutch do fine with nothing else, but then the general riding style there is a lot more relaxed, slower and also they have actual bike infrastructure.

It got kind of popularized by bike messengers in NYC as far as I can tell who, legend has it, adopted it from caribbean immigrants forced into shit jobs who just took the bicycle they knew for it - one from a velodrome (large circley bike track for racing fast). I dunno how true this is.

There is some merits to a fixed gear. It’s the least complicated bicycle you can think of, basically, and seeing how bike messengers are exploited and forced to use their personal bikes for the job, less shit to break has some advantages. It’s also undeniably more dangerous, no matter what advocates for it say. And then it spawned it’s own culture and people do it because it’s the cool thing to do.