fixed gear entering the mainstream...in SF?

Once again, there seem to be some "lifestyle" reporters with plenty of time on their hands. Only this article is from the the San Francisco Chronicle, where you'd assume it would be passé by now.

Let me just take a moment of silence over the fact that fixed gear riders are featured in a new Lincoln Navigator commercial. Because nothing says "you deserve a 6,000 pound GPS-equipped leather couch" like some extra riding by on a stripped down bike.

But really, it's the whole brakeless thing again. It just keeps coming around. A couple points from the article:

A 26-year-old is complaining about how her knees "aren't what they used to be" though she attributes this to riding up hills without gears. I've been riding single speeds for 15 years, up plenty of hills on a number of gear ratios, and the only time I've ever had knee pain was when I rode fixed gear and tried to brake with only my legs. Here's a tip: pain is your body telling you that you're a dumbass. It's worked for millions of years, and our forebears that ignored it found themselves wondering why they couldn't eat their own hands for lunch.

One rider admits that he won't ride with a brake, largely due to "a vanity thing." At least he's being honest. But he points out that he once popped his chain and had to grab the front wheel to stop. He burned through the glove, but didn't crash. Bravo, but I bet in reality it didn't look cool at all, he was probably crapping his pants.

A little tip for all of you who refuse to use a brake (especially if you don't wear gloves). Don't reach down and grab the front wheel. It's not efficient, you need those hands to, you know, steer the bike, pray to jebus, and cover up your melon when you go flying under a bus. A better option is to use the arch of your foot on the back wheel, at the spot where your back brake would go. Take your dominant foot off a pedal, and put it perpindicular to the back tire (at the rear brake bridge) and PUSH. If you have knobbyish tires, it might peel your shoes right off, but in general, it will get you home. When I rode with only a front brake on a freewheel ss bike, this was my preferred way of stopping in the rain, since a rear brake is more manageable in wet conditions. You can "skid out" sideways to keep from going under that bus, and other than the obvious delay, is a fairly effective way to slow down.

I will concede that it's possible a front brake won't do much going down an extremely steep (SF) hill. At some point, it's just not physically possible to put any additional downforce on the front wheel without tipping over the bars, though this is reserved for extreme grades, not your run-of-the-mill roads. I rode in SF a few years ago, and there are a couple of spots around Nob hill where the bike wouldn't stop. It wasn't life threatening, but the back wheel was locked and I was skidding downhill, ass off the back of the saddle, almost touching the rear wheel. Feathering the front brake slightly would tip me up into a nose wheelie, so I was doing this sort of maladroit low speed bike dance - endo, skid, endo, skid...I was definitely "playing with it" to see how the bike responded, but I could get the bike down to about 5 mph, and still skid an entire city block. Stopping required just unclipping and putting a foot down, but you could also avoid the steepest grades to avoid this.

I will say, that on some of those same hills, I saw a skateboarder flying down at better than 25-30 mph, and he was doing the sickest slides I've ever seen (both front and backside) to check his speed and full stop. Threading traffic at courier speeds, no pads, no helmet, just laying it out there like he was snowboarding at Mammoth. Sick.