falling off bikes since 1975

A Stateside Judge, has found fault with the brakeless-fixie-cool set over in Oregon.

While folk argue about the judges interpretation of Oregon Law^*, and I’ll agree he apparently lacks the sense enough to understand basic physics and bicycle dynamics, I’m not impressed by the attempts to convey these principles to him by bike messenger Ayla Holland and her lawyer, Mark Ginsberg.

There are two arguments here, 1) a legal one, and 2) a common sense one.

The Legal Argument

Legally the judge got it wrong.

A fixed rear wheel clearly meets the requirements of a brake under Oregon Law.

Oregon Law only requires “a brake”, and then specifies how strong it must be. It doesn’t specify how that braking force must be applied to the wheel. If a locked-leg rider can apply that force then they are clearly a brake. Requiring a rim or hub brake or whatever we invent in the future (William Gibson style energy storage systems anyone?) is not stated, and I can’t believe it would ever be the intent of the law to be that prescriptive.

Discussing failure modes of the rider as a braking system, e.g. “what happens if your chain breaks”, is an irrelevant diversion. The law isn’t there to cater for all failure modes, but normal operation. You might as well ask what the rider would do if a regular brake cable were to snap, or the disc were to collapse, or their energy storage capacitors were to blow out.

And you might as well ask a motorist what they’d do if their master brake cylinder were to spring a leak.

For what it’s worth under UK law bicycles must have two independent braking systems, and on a fixie the riders legs/fixed gear counts as that system for the rear wheel. So maybe I’m just coming at this from a British “of course the rider’s legs are a brake” point of view.

Whoever wrote the law itself failed to to understand bicycle dynamics though. Which is why a front wheel brake equipped bike actually fails to be legal too. Requiring that the brake is strong enough to skid the tyre makes no sense for a front brake. You’ll be over the bars before you can skid a front wheel unless a) you use low friction tyres, or b) can get your centre-of-gravity low enough/far enough back to keep the braking force vector beneath the tyre contact patch. As for the rear wheel, a skidding rear brake has gone past the point of maximum braking force, though the intention is probably that if you can generate too much braking force you can always generate just enough.

The Common Sense Argument

When it comes to common sense I think the judge has the upper hand.

While he clearly failed to understand bicycle dynamics it’s fairly clear that Ayla Holland and her lawyer were no better at understanding them or explaining them either. Though they have my sympathies when trying to explain anything to Office Barnum. Is he really as pig-headed as he comes across? To be fair he does have some common sense:

a skid is not as good or safe as a stop.

I think all parties concerned could do worse than read some Sheldon “Coasting Is Bad For You” Brown:

A front brake, all by itself, will stop a bicycle as fast as it is possible to stop. This is true because when you are applying the front brake to the maximum, there is no weight on the rear wheel, so it has no traction.

While I think the judge got it wrong from a strict interpretation of the words I do think that he interpreted the intent of the law correctly.

I think that from a common sense point of view he got it right.

Maybe he’s overreaching himself in taking away the rights of Ayla Holland to be able to put herself in danger. But that freedom comes with a price to others. As an occasional truck driver as well as a cyclist I’d hate to be put into the position of seeing a cyclist throw themselves under my wheels because they rated their image above their life.

Now that this previously grey area of Oregon Law has been clarified, then if she chooses to continue to ride “brakeless” - and from hereon I’m using that to mean the Oregon definition - then the outlaw Miss Holland will surely gain extra cool points in the brakeless-fixie clique for defying The Man.

I can’t understand why you’d want to ride brakeless fixie other than fashion, or to make an “I’m an outlaw, me” statement and defy The Man. Oooh, you’re sooo scary. Defying The Man by endangering your own life! I bet society is quaking in it’s boots. Grow up, read A Flower Called Nowhere, who makes the point far more eloquently than I ever could, and then take good long introspective look at yourself. Is your self-confidence that bad that you would rather run with the fashion pack than stand up to them? Hey! You can stand up to The Man, but you can’t stand up to your stupid suicidal peers?

Maybe I’m just too uncool. When I used a fixie to commute to work a couple years back I was more than happy to use two brakes. I was much happier being uncool and alive than cool and dead. Actually I hadn’t even realised there was a fixie scene and that I was being uncool. I thought I was just helping my legs to spin.

*Oregon Revised Statute (ORS) 815.280(2)(a):

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.