fauxto nick

Sorry man, I gotta disagree. I have a lot of friends who ride brakeless very well. I know it's fun, I can handle riding brakeless myself. BUT I think it's irresponsible to ride brakeless for the simple fact that no matter how good you are at riding brakeless and skid/bump stopping you are adding risk. If you want to put yourself at risk, that's fine, I do it daily, but I'm not putting others at risk with my riding.

You'd be pretty hard pressed to mess up braking using brake levers but IMO when you're relying on a learned skill like skid stopping to brake you are taking a chance. All it would take is for you to miss your skid to cause bodily harm or property damage (I personally saw a bmw get trashed just because a kid messed up on his stop when his foot came out of his clip).

I'm glad to see kids riding bikes but I'm not happy about seeing more and more kids go out on the road and getting overly aggressive with drivers and riding recklessly. I'm the only one out of my group of friends who rides road bikes, most ride brakeless fixed, and I'm definitely the only one putting down serious miles. I tell them it's great when they go out to a critical mass and cause a ruckus but I'm the one who spends more time on the road with these ticked off drivers.

If more people in LA want to start riding AWESOME! But if someone has never really ridden seriously before maybe a brakeless bike isn't the best bet to dive into the world of cycling, and on top of that this isn't The Warriors lol no need to treat every driver like a seal clubbing, nazi.