“Hold on to those bell-bottom jeans.”  My mother told me. “You never know when they will come back in style.” Turns out she was right. Sure enough; Bell-bottomed jeans did make a comeback sometime in early 2003 if my memory serves. All the celebrities and fashion barons were dredging up the hippie look to run it up the flagpole of fashion again, this time in trendy boutiques at $200 dollars a whack.  Being fashion conscious (as well as cripplingly cheap) I remembered the box I had stored and thought to myself “I’m sitting on a gold mine here.” Well it turns out I can’t wear the same pants I did when I was 7 not to mention they now carried the distinct odor of mold and three decade old Yoo-hoo farts. (I used to drink the stuff by the gallon back then).

I have seen another trend seeping its way back into the mainstream from relative obscurity, this one I don’t have a box full of being stored in the garage; Fixed gear bikes. If you take a moment to look around you might be surprised at the amount of “new” bicyclists that are riding fixed gears on the streets here in Arizona, in specific clustered around, ASU, Mill Ave. and downtown Phoenix. Fixed gear bikes are obviously the epoch of bicycle culture. Everything that bicycles have become came from those first models. The Victorian aged Boneshaker or Penny-farthing bike is an early example of a fixed drive train.  While the current models “kids” these days are riding don’t have much in common with those bikes, they are still the same idea; a form of utilitarian transportation boiled down to the bare bone essentials. That’s not to say the bikes are all built on the cheap. On the contrary, some of the bikes out there cost as much as your carbon roadie with a lot less accouchements’. No shifters, no derailleur’s, no cassettes, no chain tensioner, no cables, no levers, and most importantly; no brakes. This part seems to be what attracts the youth to the bike.  In their eyes it’s a new daring take on an old idea, kind of like selling bell-bottom jeans at Nordstrom’s.

Although many other cities with a dense downtown and a need for a bicycle messengers might say “fixed gears are soooo 2002.” Their popularity is only increasing in most measurable aspects. A local site; AZFixed.com, describes itself as “all things fixed gear in Arizona” It isn’t a self appointed expert, but rather a forum for local riders and event information. A number of alleycats, or fixed gear point-to-point messenger styled races are advertised on the site regularly and one of the sites administrators tells me there are over 500 regular posters with tens of thousands of page views per day. A statistical breakdown might find as many posts about women and beer drinking as bicycles, but isn’t that true of any bike related website? I’m not saying you are sitting on a gold mine, but that old steel frame you have hanging up behind your wife’s SUV in the garage, might just make a sweet fixie conversion.

-G. O’Dell [reporter at large]