It's not that I hate fixed gear per say, I even like it sometimes like that weird dutch bike dancing stuff, or is it Swedish? I just don't like it. I guess it would be much better to say that I don't understand it. I feel like it's the same as climbing into lycra every time you want to saddle up. It's just not necessary.
I completely understand the aesthetics of these bicycles, since they have very clean lines and are usually associated with underground culture. But, if it were truly underground, why do they care about aesthetics? This seems to me to be the complete opposite of a counter culture it's just... culture. The motto should be "we're different in a same kind of way."
Functionally, I feel that there are few places for the fixed gear bike. Tricks, if you can call them functional, seem like they lend themselves to fixed gear bikes and bike polo for that matter seems like a good fit, but for actual transportation they just don't make sense.
The one argument I hear for them is that they require less maintenance. Less parts, less maintenance seems to make sense, but they probably go through tires like crazy. Bicycles are also not complex machines. It's not that hard to adjust brakes and derailers (I'm going Sheldon Brown on the spelling) or do pretty much anything else to your bike. A community ride I participate in on most weeks has a few transplants from New York in it, and they have told us why messengers ride fixed, they're poor, and not the kind of romantic starving artist poor, but the strung out on heroin and then stealing parts and bikes from other people to make more money kind of poor. So unless you're hooked on meth there shouldn't be much problem in cracking open a library book on bicycle maintenance and figuring out how to do things on your own, and you can get really cheap tools from pawn shops where other drug addicts have sold their tool sets for Oxycontin.
There is also the supposed zen aspect of riding a fixed gear. I keep hearing this crap about not having your mind clouded by wondering what gear you need to have it in and that riding fixed frees you from that and you can be one with the universe. If you need to think about what gear your in than you're not doing it right.
In a forum, I read one person's entry who explained that riding a fixie was like driving a manual transmission on a car. Obviously this person doesn't drive a manual transmission because riding a bike with multiple gears is almost exactly like driving a manual transmission. Besides the embarrassing stalls you can still stall out on hills and spin your legs like a hamster in too low a gear. I think what this person meant to say is that riding a fixed gear bike is like driving an automatic, because in an automatic you just have forward and reverse though I've never heard of anyone describing driving an automatic transmission as a zen like experience because you don't have to do anything. Maybe a golf cart would be a better comparison since the brake and accelerator is sometimes on the same pedal.
I also hate the idea that someone on a fixed gear bike is faster than someone who has a more complex transmission. I'm sure this started because fixed gear riders would blast past some amateur-pro racer in spandex who rides an hour every month and thought that was proof that their fixed gear stallions were faster. I assure you that if fixed gear made you faster than everyone in the Tour de France would be riding fixed.
The thing I dislike the most is that I have no idea what to call my own bike. I can't just say I have a geared bike, because technically a fixed gear does have gears, two of them in fact, so multiple gears doesn't really work either, so I've decided to jokingly call my bike a Mixed Gear or mixie if you want to be derisive.
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