Is the London fixie dead?

http://www.bikeradar.com/commuting/news/article/is-the-london-fixie-dead-36928/

Hehe

Silly article. Hybrids have been dominant articles for commuters for about as long as the genre has existed---- more or less since the 1980s when the market filtered MTB technology into the roadster to create the ATB. Before that the commuters rode 3-speed roadsters and the "sporty" fraction rode "half-racers". The 1970s bike boom (clearly linked to the 1973 oil embargo and peaking in the late 1970s on the heels of the 1978-79 oil crisis) help define bicycles as a status and fashion object-- it also helped kickstart Honda as a motorcar brand (the civic). The bike boom saw a lot of poorly made bicycle swamping the market--- Colnago and others claimed that many of these were counterfiets (pun intended). The MTB fashion hit Europe pretty hard in the mid 1980s and trickled down into the supermarkets just as the "fixed gear" has. Fixed gear bicycles have been hip since the 1990s but it took the 2007 market collapse to go mainstream--- from Hummer to Cinelli MASH. Motorcars are selling again in the US (2009 sales reach a 27 year low) and large pickups are after 5 years of decline back on the map with heavy growth. In Europe car sales are still sluggish (at a 15 year low, for example, in France) and with high levels of youth unemployment in most of the EU, bicycles are still going strong.

NOTE: Supermarkets on the European Continent seem these days to be still dominated by cheap poorly assembled hybrids with a sprinkling of MTBs and roadsters (all of Asian origin).