Thread: Gimmie a Brake. (hipster related)

Oh the humanity. Portland judge rules against messenger riding fixed-gear bike without brakes. Don ye your tight jeans and take to the streets for a Critical Mass!

Lawyer sez:

“The state is overreaching in seeking to define a brake as a lever and a caliper. The question remains; is the fixed gear the brake? The statutes are clear that the answer is yes.”

Judge sez:

“If your client had a stick she could rub against her tire, you’d have a case. I don’t believe the defense has convinced me to broaden the definition of a brake. I find the defendant guilty.”

I find all this simultaneously fascinating and dumb. Discuss.

Was she wearing a studded belt and a Colnago cycling cap?

That judge is ridiculous.

Colnago?

Fuck that, it's Campy all the way.

do bike messengers really have jobs or is it all a cover up to smoke pot and race around in traffic?

I'm pretty sure it's a cover. I always see them hanging out on the Comm Ave mall smoking pot and poo pooing Cat III racers.

Stumptown coffee pays them extra for having star tattoos on their calves and to sit outside the downtown shop looking all pouty and full of 'tude. Don't forget the sidi dominators, mandatory attire.

By the way, what the fuck is up with the star tattoos?

I've always thought it had something to do with Heroin use.

A guy I used to work with at a shop here in Portland got that ticket, too. It's been a weird summer for Portland cyclists' relationship with the law. Back in May and June the cops were hiding out along the bike routes to ticket stop sign rollers and other minor offenses. Now there are a bunch of these "no brakes" tickets. I was out of town for a while so I may have missed other chapters of this saga.
Over the winter there were some nasty bike-car interactions, including a scenario where a biker took the lane from a bus and then the bus driver let a passenger off at the next stop to punch the biker out (he was taunting the bus) and then let the puncher back on. Portland's critical mass and Zoobombers have always been at odds with the po-po. Maybe the cops are using their leverage to assert their position? I'd rather the fought the meth heads.
The consequences of tarnishing Portland's "ultra bike-friendly" image are not clear to me, but what's to gain by harassing cyclists?

$242 ticket for rolling a stop sign in Portland. That "sting" was unbelievably stupid. Not like the PDX police have nothing to do but have idling squad cars catching these terrorists of the 4-way stop. All because some neighbor bitched about it.

Critical Mass has been both friendly with the cops and ugly again recently too it seems. I have not been recently, but that's what it seems like.

Bikers still have it very good out here in Portland though.

Originally Posted by blog

Ginsberg explains how a fixed gear works.

I love his ultra concentrated serious lawyer expression. Classic.

This is why I always carry a stick in my bag.

Originally Posted by Orange Julius

$242 ticket for rolling a stop sign in Portland. That "sting" was unbelievably stupid. Not like the PDX police have nothing to do but have idling squad cars catching these terrorists of the 4-way stop. .

Rolling a stop sign? That's facked up man. The code here states that cyclists can treat stop signs as yields but do have to stop at lights. Portland sounds like it has a nice little revenue stream going. Lame.

Hate to break it to ya but if you're going to ride on the roads then you are required to have certain pieces of safety equipment. In NYC this includes a bell, headlight and taillight and at least one brake. You should see all these high $$ road bikes with bells on them, it looks kinda silly but is obviously smarter than getting multiple $100 fix it tickets. As far as a brake on a fixie goes, well it's just sensible. If the bike is being used anywhere other than a track a brake might just come in handy. If you don't think so you should check out the story behind more than half of the ghost bikes in NYC.

How did she get a lawyer to fight a $73 ticket?

Gravity Lover , I googled ghost bike and read each entry on the first three pages and did not see anything related to fixed gears. I was shocked to hear the a couple dozen people died last year in NYC. How many does that mean were injured?

Is Portland a walking city? Is any city in the US a walking city besides NYC and some parts of Boston, DC, and Chicago? The reason I ask is that I'm quite content that they require brakes on single speeds in NYC. Please, there is no fucking way you're stopping in time before you hit that old lady if you don't at least have one brake. Especially if you're stoned with a "'tude".

No but if you see how many had "couldn't stop in time" or "improper equipment" it kinda gives it away. I'm not saying it was just fixies but good brakes are critical. Benny wasn't just joking when he said hit the next old lady, pedestrians do some of the dumbest shit. Most of the time traffic is relatively predictable in an urban setting, getting "doored" is when the driver has already morphed into a pedestrian and swerving into moving traffic because you couldn't stop when said old lady steps out from between parked cars because you had no or insufficient brakes is inexcusable. I don't want me or my wife or one of my friends to be the one that takes you out and have to live with that guilt.

there was a quick new blip on tv today that Denver cops were issuing tickets for bike speeding in Washington Park!!! I know there are probably 0 maggots that acutally ride the silly concrete loop, but i felt that it relates to this as far as silly tickets for bikers.

BTW, I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure all he had to do to win this case was show that:

a) she could skid

b) Mechanical brakes fail too.

No?

I think fixies are completely retarded and unsafe on the road.*

I also think that people should be allowed to be retarded and unsafe unless they hurt someone else doing it. More fixies = more Mission dot-com hipsters getting smashed under a bus. Everyone wins!

(*Even worse than the poor braking is the fact that you can't coast around corners and will probably hit your pedal and crash if you try to turn at speed.)

The only purpose that bike messengers are good for are economic studies:

http://www.iew.unizh.ch/wp/iewwp125.pdf
(forthcoming in the most important economics research journal - American Economic Review)

Originally Posted by Spats

Even worse than the poor braking is the fact that you can't coast around corners and will probably hit your pedal and crash if you try to turn at speed.

While this is possible, with a little care, it is not common. Bottom line, fixed gear bikes are really fun to ride. Plus, they get you fit, fast, and improve your riding.

For what it is worth, most of the kids hanging out at Pop’s have the majority of their meager net worth invested in their bikes. Do you?

Originally Posted by Cornholio

BTW, I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure all he had to do to win this case was show that:

a) she could skid

b) Mechanical brakes fail too.

No?

I'm no legal-eagle myself, but it sure seemed like Bike Lawyer Dude argued both those points and them some. Judge Velocipede McGrumpypants didn't want to be bothered with, you know, details or the vagueties of the existing law.

This must be one of them crazy rogue "activist judges" the White House has been warning us about.

Originally Posted by Greydon Clark

While this is possible, with a little care, it is not common. Bottom line, fixed gear bikes are really fun to ride. Plus, they get you fit, fast, and improve your riding.

For what it is worth, most of the kids hanging out at Pop’s have the majority of their meager net worth invested in their bikes. Do you?

How did I know you'd show up in this thread.

Originally Posted by Hugh Jass

How did I know you'd show up in this thread.

Because I rule and StoneyWall hates the Interweb.

Personally, I dont see why anyone would ride a fixie without a front brake. Yeah, the cable and level kinda ruins the clean lines of the bike, but why would you make the bike you ride more dangerous, on purpose?

This appeared on cyclingnews today:
Fixies outlawed?

By John Stevenson

There's been a bit of hoo-ha in various bike forums around the net in the last few days about a case in Portland, Oregon where a rider was fined for not having a separate brake on her fixed-gear bike. According to bikeportland.org, bike messenger Ayla Holland was ticketed on June 1 and charged with violating Oregon Revised Statute (ORS) 815.280(2)(a) which states:

A bicycle must be equipped with a brake that enables the operator to make the braked wheels skid on dry, level, clean pavement. strong enough to skid tire.

Ms Holland's lawyer Mark Ginsberg attempted to argue that a fixie's transmission constituted a brake. The judge was having none of it, and in his decision said:

"The brake must be a device separate from the musculature of the rider. Take me for instance. I don't have leg muscles as strong as a messenger… how would I stop safely?"

This has led to some rather alarmist talk about the future of fixies. "Will the cops now feel emboldened to go out and ticket everyone on a fixed-gear? Are fixed-gears now essentially illegal? Are fixed-gears truly a public safety hazard?" asks Jonathan Maus in bikeportland.org.

Well, no. The issue here is a badly-written piece of legislation being interpreted by a judge so that it achieves its aims, rather than what the absolute letter of the law says.

A fixed-gear bike with no brakes cannot stop in as short a space as one with a front brake, because only the rear wheel is providing the braking force. As a vehicle on the road, it's therefore clearly less safe.

This is a matter of simple physics. In the third edition of Bicycling Science, David Gordon Wilson demonstrates that the maximum deceleration of a crouched rider on a standard bike (that is, not a recumbent) on a dry road is 0.56g. Try to brake any harder than that and you go over the handlebars, which is the limit condition, as the limit from tyre adhesion of vehicles that don't pitch over (tandems, recumbents and cars) is about 0.8g.

If you brake with only the rear wheel, according to Wilson, the limit is 0.256g, because braking effectively shifts your weight forward, reducing the load on the rear wheel to the point that it skids at that deceleration. Once a tyre is skidding, its braking effectiveness is reduced because you no longer have sticky solid rubber in contact with the road, but a lubricating layer of molten rubber. (Which incidentally demonstrates that the Oregon legislation was written by someone with no clue at all about bikes.)

Therefore, however good a fixie rider is, stopping distance is roughly doubled without a front brake. In practice, it's probably more than that.

In some jurisdictions, better-written laws make this issue moot. In the UK, for example, the law requires a bike to have two independent braking systems. I used to ride a fixie in the winter in the UK, and I knew quite a few fixie riders who dispensed with a rear brake on the grounds that the transmission was a braking system, but I never met anyone daft enough to have just a rear brake.

This judge has clearly decided to ignore the letter of the law in favour of enforcing its obvious intent, that bikes have at least one maximally effective brake. That's the sort of thing judges are handy for: turning legislation written by idiots into rules that make sense in the real world.

All that fixie riders have to do to conform is slap on a front brake; hardly rocket surgery, and a long way from fixies being suddenly illegal. And to fixie riders who are about to reach for the email to defend riding brakeless fixies, I refer you to Cmdr Montgomery Scott: "You canna change the laws of physics!"