Originally Posted by
Danre
My experience with single gear bikes comes from my childhood. They were fun. Still, I left them for geared bikes. After checking out this forum for the last month or so, I noticed a couple of commuters using single gear bikes to commute. I will admit that at first I found the idea absurd, but now am becoming rather attracted to it. It just looks so simple and easy to maintain. The one thing that I am confused on though is this: How efficient are those things?
It seems that having 20-some gears lets you find the right gear whether you're going up, down, or are level. Thus you can maintain a decent speeds on inclines without feeling like you're doing weighted lunges and push a nice speed once the road allows you. My theoretical thinking is that having only one gear the bike would be good at one thing or the other, but not all of them. Is this true? Like said, I haven't been on a single in over a decade and I would like those who have some experience to enlighten me on how it is to commute on them.
Thanks.
There is some compromise depending on how you set it up, but there are also some advantages over a geared bike. All of this is of course, subjective.
For me, the way my bike is set up it's compromise is downhill sprinting. With my gearing (70 gear inches) I lose out on top end speed going down steep hills. Since I rarely find myself bombing really long hills, there's really only one route where I lose out on a fixed gear. To me this isn't much of a sacrifice weighed against what I've gained from riding a fixed gear.
What I've gained is riding what IMO is the ideal urban traffic bicycle. Weaving through multiple lanes of stopped traffic is ideal on a fixed gear bike with steep geometry. There's alot more low speed control with a fixed gear drivetrain, and the steeper geometry makes tight turning far easier. This balances out the loss of top end speed for me which isn't really practical in heavy traffic conditions anyway, so I'm not losing out on much IMO and gaining quite a bit in turn.
All of course is my subjective opinion. Try it out, you may really like it. I originally wanted to go single speed, tried fixed and haven't had any desire to look back