Originally Posted by
79pmooney
No. It is a fix gear with a choice of ratios. Freewheeling is fundamentally different. Go do 5 450 mile Cycle Oregons on a fix gear, bring all the cogs you want and change to your heart's content then come back here and tell me I am wrong. (Well, you missed the chance. The week-long COs are gone for good. So just go out and do a 9,000' of climbing day fixed. Then find 3 more days of 5000' plus. You'll see that never, ever being able to coast is fundamentally different. And you will ever after look at the freewheel life as being the softer, easier way. Or you might not finish that ride or find it is just too hard You can step up and prove me wrong. And after, if you did it all, you can look back and compare, which was more real, that ride on a fix gear or that ride with the freewheeling. Bet you'll be more proud of the fixed version.)
Steel Charlie said "
That's just a multi speed bike with a really inconvenient shifting mechanism." He didn't say anything about freewheel versus fixed. Of course, his reference to convenient gear shifting does imply a freewheel, except for Sturmey Archer's fixed-gear multi-speed hubs.
By the way, I believe paved roads in mountainous terrain on the West Coast are generally graded more sensibly than East Coast roads. Granted, any given climb out West can be tediously long compared to the East. But I don't quite understand the need for multiple cogs. Since I began riding fixed 60 years ago, I've done plenty of rides with 5k feet of climbing, including a few times last year, and I've only ever used a 51/19 or 48/18 gear - roughly 72 inches. (Knees are beginning to complain, so I may soon need to go to 46/18 or so.)
Maybe it's that long, continuous climbs on moderate grades are ultimately tougher than shorter, steeper climbs. Climbs in northern Baltimore County rarely exceed 10 minutes. The only other terrain I've ridden was New Haven County in Connecticut, where I grew up, and that was very similar to Baltimore County - short, sharp climbs everywhere north of the city.