The Fixie Bike Index

Wait a second- <a href="https://dl.dropbox.com/u/3387895/Screen%20shot%202012-01-17%20at%209.38.13%20AM.png" rel="nofollow">https://dl.dropbox.com/u/3387895/Screen%20shot%202012-01-17%...</a><p>There are 100 fixies per capita in Manhattan? So each person in Manhattan owns 100 fixed gear bicycles? No wonder rent is so expensive; I imagine storing 100 bicycles isn't cheap!!

Fixies have always been a fun subject of armchair economics. As late as '06, it was very rare that you'd come across track bike-specific parts. This was especially so with frames. Finding an old track hub in a used parts bin was practically winning the jackpot on a slot machine. Prices and competition for used parts was high, but mostly stable and flat. Ebay and track-specific forums were where you'd buy your parts; local bike shops hardly didn't even know the word 'fixie', let alone stock track parts (with it especially hard to find reasonably priced, non-Olympic competition level components).<p>The trend was growing quick, and folks started finding fancier and fancier vintage bikes as collectors realized that the market for the obscure bikes lit up like wildfire. At the same time manufacturers (big and small, global and local) began sourcing extremely cheap (&#62;$300) frames from Taiwan and saturating the market, bringing prices down ~50%.<p>Then the Crash happend in '08. The market for fixies, mostly a semi-practical luxury item/status symbol similar to an iPhone at the time, fell significantly. They're still a big deal and quite popular, but not nearly as much so as a few years ago. Prices, especially the used market fallen drastically. A cheap, Average condition frame that went for $300 in early '08 could barely get $100 today in San Francisco.<p>Luckily for those who bought into the vintage/collector track bike market (like most), prices are relatively stable...

&#62;For those unfamiliar, a fixed gear bike requires riding in a single gear and the only way to stop the bike is to pedal backwards to help skid the bike to a halt.<p>Lack-of-brakes do not a fixed gear make.<p>All bicycles should have at least two ways to stop. Fixed gear bicycles are no exception.

To answer the question about Salt Lake City's bike market, I live in Park City, and mountain bike with a bunch of SLC guys, and I know the bike market there pretty well. It's about demographics. SLC doesn't have many more urban commuter/transportation bikers than any similar-sized city, and in fact I think that the per-capita rate of casual cyclists is actually below the national average. But it does have a lot of serious cyclists who spend major money on high end mountain and road bikes. So that skews the average.

Missing detail: A fixie is actually borderline-practical in Manhattan because there aren't many hills. If you live in Brooklyn, you've gotta ride over some really steep bridges to get to Manhattan. So the hipsters ride single-speeds, or retro-bikes, which are actually more hipster than a fixie these days.<p>Get with it, grandpa!

Orange County is a county, with a 3,000,000 population twice that of Manhattan (a borough.)<p>Orange, CA is a city, with a population of 150,000<p>Why is Orange County listed in the chart when all other entrants seem to be cities (or boroughs).

This is a more thorough version of what a popular bike blog "bikesnobnyc" used to call the "pistadex", where he used the average price of a bianchi pista to determine the popularity of the fixie trend.

The Brooklyn vs. Manhattan result shouldn't be surprising considering that Brooklyn is really REALLY big, and much poorer than Manhattan. I would bet that if you were to whittle down Brooklyn to Williamsburg, or if you were to control for income, the results would look significantly different.

How is Chicago not in the index at all! Majority of bikes I see in the city are fixed gear, including my own. The flat land makes it ideal.

Fixies in Portland are OVER! It's all about the abomination mutant cycles.

Perhaps if one could calculate altitude variance it would be helpful. It take a pretty fanatical cyclist to take a fixie up some of the routes from Boulder.

Having moved to Los Angeles only 7 months ago, I was really surprised to see fixies as a dominant mode of transport, especially within the Latino community (colored, deep-V rims are a huge trend). And even though LA tops the chart in terms of # bikes for sale, that doesn't mean it's a high percentage of people biking (very unfortunate). LA's trying to add more bike lanes, but it's a pretty dismal situation here.

Wow - according to this, Spokane (#30) has more hipsters per capita than Seattle (#33). That's a bit difficult to process. Seattle is literally built around biking. I guess the actual bikes are more practical in nature and less hipsterish? As in, an actual means of transportation rather than personal branding. Still pretty hard to believe. UW alone should tip the scales.

Damn Synchronicity <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity</a><p>I am seriously considering getting a fixie or single speed and this article pops up on Hacker News.<p>I remember about 5 years ago getting a fixie was more of an enthusiast cyclist endeavor than a hipster one. I don't care, it's better for training and feels less inhibited.

Isn't there a bit of a huge problem using the number for sale as the metric here? Couldn't more supply equate to less demand?

You failed to note that the relative hilliness of two cities could have a huge effect on the reliability of using the "fixie index" to measure relative hipsterness. Even if they were equally hipsterish, it would stand to reason that LA would have more fixies than SF, since the bike is far more practical in that city.

"There are more bikes offered for sale in Brooklyn than Manhattan, but only 8.3% of them are fixies versus 9.5% in Manhattan."<p>This is key. Fixies as fraction of for-sale bike population &#60;&#62; prevalence of fixies on streets.<p>From a purely anecdotal angle (supported by BikeSnobNyc's recurring photographs of DIY fenders), there's a lot of cheap mountain bikes in Brooklyn. In contrast, a Manhattanite who commutes by chauffeur or all-Dura-Ace, not-for-sale-on-Craigslist Colnago isn't part of the sample.

One critique of your "Top 50 Cities in America for Biking." You seem to actually be evaluating churn in the bicycle resale market, not riding or ridability. Of course college towns have more bikes for sale - partly due to their practical nature for getting around, and partly due to students buying bikes when they arrive and selling them when they leave.

When I was a kid, I thought all bikes had only one gear. Not because I was "hip" or "hipster" (absolutely the opposite) but because my parents were cheap. I had been riding my used "fixie" bike (from the thrift store) for a year before I found out about bikes with gears, and I actually never learned how to use different gears when riding.

How about State Code on the Fixie Index. <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aik-d7nXHh6SdGtWRjNLVFJPTkw2Y2g0bmpiaWY3TkE#gid=1" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aik-d7nXHh6SdGt...</a>

I'm surprised that Allentown, PA has the fewest fixies for sale per capita as there is a velodrome there.<p><a href="http://www.thevelodrome.com/contact-us/directions/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thevelodrome.com/contact-us/directions/</a>

is the metric of bicycles for sale a good indicator of anything but people giving up? That says to me a large population are bailing rather than riding. Are hipsters known for giving up when the pedaling gets tough?

Cool to see my home state of Oregon up there on all those indexes. A bit surprising to see Bend though. To tell the truth, I think it's too cold up there to be that pleasant a place to ride around much.

I love how my home state (RI) is considered as a whole...

this is flawed, because they are making the assumption that only hipsters use fixies in SOCal. The surfer community has tons of beach cruisers that are fixed gear, and I dare you to go to a parking lot or a lineup and call a bunch of surfers 'hipsters'....

According to the first graph, there are 100 fixies per capita in Manhattan.

Does anyone know where the data came from? How it was collected?

Amazing to me how highly Spokane ranks on all of these.

This analysis is interesting but deeply flawed, as you're just using one variable. I don't think anyone would refer to OC as the most hipster place in America.<p>Weather is a huge missing component. Another is hilliness/other bike-friendliness (bike lanes, etc). The top 12 cities in the analysis are warm-weather cities (mostly California/Hawaii).<p>For example, no-one is buying bikes in Chicago at the moment, because it's freaking cold. But there are likely many more fixed-gear bikes here than almost anywhere else (flat, bike-friendly city with lots of hipsters). Portland is capital of hipsterdom - well atleast until Pittsburgh takes over (<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/arts-post/post/portlandia-your-15-minutes-are-up-long-live-pittsburgh/2012/01/03/gIQAMUlSYP_blog.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/arts-post/post/portlandi...</a>) but it's cold there right now so people aren't selling their bikes.