If you’re cycling around all day every day for a job, having a geared bike with brakes is a chore. You tire yourself out more on a ‘conventional’ bike, because you’re acceleration / deceleration tend to be less smooth. With a fixie, you tend to find you maintain a much steadier pace. The accel / decel is what tires you out most, so the less of that you do, the better. For example, on a standard bike, you typically tend to approach a stop, freewheeling, without thinking about it, then brake to a stop, then have to start from a standstill, and have to accelerate much more sharply, than you would if you had managed to approach the same point on a fixie. You soon learn to anticipate, and avoid so many ‘dead stops’ on a fixie. The only thing I found scary with a fixie, was turning a corner on an unfamiliar stretch of road, and finding a sharp steep descent. That’s not fun.
