Bike Snob - Anonymous [63]
Handlebar Width
Another fashion that comes from messengers is using extremely narrow bars. Messengers spend a lot of time riding through traffic, so they often want their handlebars as narrow as possible so they can slip between cars. This lends the bike an aggressive look, which has since been picked up on by non-messenger fixed-gear riders. However, like most practical choices that have evolved into fashionable affectations, the narrow bar thing has been taken way too far, with riders now often leaving just a fistful of bar on either side of the stem. If narrow bars are cool, then really narrow bars are really cool, right? So now people look like they’re controlling their bikes with hot dogs.
Levers are important. Let’s go back to the famous Archimedes quote, “Give me a large enough lever and a place to stand, and I will move the Earth.” You might notice that hot dogs are conspicuously absent from his sentence. This is because handlebars are levers by which you control and transfer power to the bike, and while there’s nothing wrong with short, stubby things (infer from that what you will), they don’t make very good levers.
That doesn’t mean the bars you use on your city bike need to be as wide as the ones you might use on, say, a single-speed mountain bike. They don’t—you need much more leverage and stability on a mountain bike to control the bike on rough terrain and to get adequate leverage for powering up climbs. The same bars that get you over those rock gardens on the trails will have you banging your knuckles on car side mirrors in the city. However, there’s absolutely no point in having bars that are narrower than your hips, which are roughly level with your hands when you’re riding and ultimately need to pass through the same spaces.
Once you go narrower than your hips, you’ve officially crossed the fashion Rubicon, and certain things happen. Firstly, you have seriously reduced control over rough pavement. Secondly, you have no place to move your hands, which can be uncomfortable even for short rides. Thirdly, it will be much harder to get out of the saddle on even the smallest rise. It’s especially ironic that the narrowest bars are to be found on fixed-gears, since single-speed drivetrains require even more leverage than geared bikes, because you don’t have the option of downshifting to increase your rhythm and speed.
But most importantly, when you ride around clutching your hot dog bars, you look like a kid on a Sit ‘n Spin, or a grave-digger leaning on the handle of a spade, or a sommelier struggling to extricate the cork from a bottle of wine he’s clutching with his knees. Short bars are great for showing the world your knuckle tattoos, but they’re no good for actually controlling a bike.
Brakelessness
In recent years, few subjects in cycledom have become as controversial as brakeless fixed-gear riding. With the popularity of fixed-gear bicycles, brakelessness has entered the canon of endless cycling debates, right alongside the road bike group debate (Campagnolo vs. Shimano vs. SRAM), the helmet debate, and the frame material debate. But unlike these other debates in which both sides make valid points, there’s only one argument for riding brakeless: fashion.
Before going further, it’s worth looking at the modern history of brakeless fixed-gear riding on the road. I say “modern” because the fact is we’ve been through all of this before; in the 1880s those “safety” bikes didn’t have brakes either, but after various crashes and debates and redesigns brakes eventually became the norm. Bicycles raced in velodromes never had brakes and still don’t; so once people started riding these brakeless track bikes on the road en masse the whole debate has resurrected itself over a hundred years later.
It used to be that the people who rode track bikes on the road didn’t use brakes for the same reason the old-timey people didn’t: they weren’t there. Track bikes were designed