|
by Dan Charles
NPR, February 6, 2007
It's the latest, coolest thing in pedal-powered
transportation: Bikes with no gears and no brakes. You'll find them on city
streets from New York to San Francisco, mostly in the company of
young, rugged-looking bicyclists.
Take a close look at Vincent Betette's
bicycle, for instance. Betette is a bike
messenger in Washington,
D.C. He rides a sleek machine
that is stripped down to the bare essentials: Two wheels on a light steel frame
with curving handlebars of bare metal. There are no cables, and no gears
— and there's no coasting, either. This is a "fixed-gear"
bike; if the wheels are turning, the pedals have to turn too, the way
bicycles worked 100 years ago.
The pedals don't just make the bike go. They're also
what Betette uses to stop, because this bike has
no brakes. If Betette needs to slow down, he
pushes back against the pedals, forcing his legs to go slower. And if a car
cuts in front of him, "I just lock my legs up and kind of slide out of
the way."
Such bikes are also commonly called "track
bikes." They are what Olympic racers ride on indoor banked tracks
called velodromes.
Now they're taking over the streets. Bike messengers
discovered them first. These street matadors liked the ruggedness of track
bikes. Courier Andy Zalen says they also liked
the way the bikes feel — there's something addictive about riding a
bike in which your feet are tied to the wheels, he says — and the way
they look. "There's something beautiful in the simplicity of a track
bike."
It's that "look," says Vincent Betette, that seems to have caught on with the young
and hip crowd. "We have a name for them," he says. "FAMS:
Fake-a** messengers. That's what we call them. They got our bags, they got our
bikes. It's a fashion accessory now."
Betette isn't sure some of
these people belong on bikes with no brakes. A lot of people who've picked
up fixed-gear bikes lately "just can't stop them," he says.
"They go headlong into the backs of cars. A lot of them are going to
learn the hard way, and a lot of them are going to catch on and they're
going to love it."
Track bikes have even spread to the suit and tie crowd.
Michael Simpson gets to his office in downtown Washington by by
riding 17 miles on a old red bicycle that he
converted to a fixed-gear. "It feels like being a kid again. You don't
have to worry about what gear you're in, or what components you have. You
just get on the bike and go where you want to go," he says.
But when he was a kid, didn't he want gears? "Oh, I
definitely wanted gears when I was kid," he says, laughing.
Now that he's a grownup, Simpson is also a little more
cautious. His bike — like Andy Zalen's
— does have a hand brake. It spoils that pure, minimalist look a bit,
but a brake makes it less likely that you'll crash into a bus.
|
