Brakes

Some wag once wrote that the ability to stop is amongst the more important things for both machines and humans...

I rebuild and repair a lot of bikes, and I often notice that though the rest of the bike might be rather crappy and poorly maintained, the brakes are often rather pristine, almost as if they had never been used.

This was brought home to me the other day when I was at work and doing my usual Sunday thing, sitting on a parking lot in my patrol car. A young woman showed up with perhaps 5 little kids, all on bikes. I guess she decided that the parking lot was a good place to let the kids ride. They ranged from one tyke young enough to have training wheels, up to a max of about 7 or 8. All the kids would dash madly down the length of the parking rows, and then lurch around the "turn" at the end and go the other way.
None of them ever touched their brakes. They all had been equipped with youth-sized mountain bikes with typical controls, including standard brake levers. They would charge up to the point where they had to turn, then sort of "lurch" around the turn.

I began to wonder...Are people afraid to use the brakes on bicycles? There does seem to be a sort of "folk wisdom" that if you apply front brakes too hard, you'll fly over the bars. Doesn't happen, of course, unless you "help" with body english.
I do notice that rear brakes tend to be more worn than fronts...

Sort of related is an incident from my brief motocross racing career. (Long about 1974-75) This was AMA "sportsman" racing, the sort of thing where you'd buy some sort of dual-purpose motorcycle and strip off all the street gear and then go racing.
I was riding Hodaka, a Japanese marque that was popular as it was almost race-ready out of the box.
You had to tune up the little 100cc engine a bit, but that was pretty easy. Once you had made the even-tempered little two-stroke into a fire-breathing racer, it wasn't easy to keep it running at low speed.
Enter the reed valve. Reed valves are devices which prevent "blowback" in two-stroke engines. Thus, they can run at low RPM even in race tuning. These things were becoming popular, and I was considering buying one. One of the other guys who hung out at the shop had just got one, and he was quite enthusiastic about it. So, during practice period at one of the races, I asked him if I could take his bike around the track. "Sure", he said, and I fired it up and roared down the straight. Thing ran great! Then I got to turn one... I squeezed the brake levers, which went all the way back to the handlebars! Fortunately, I didn't crash, and managed to get it back to the pits in one piece.
"You have no brakes!" I complained.
"Oh, I never use 'em."

Now, anyone who knows anything about racing knows that braking is as important a facet as is accelleration and handling. Charge as fast as possible till the last minute, brake as hard as possible to get down to the speed you need to get through the turn, and accellerate.
This guy could have cut seconds off his lap times with proper braking, but was quite unaware of basic techniqe.

I wonder how many folks are in the same shape regarding bicycling. Watching many people ride, it's apparent that an awful lot of them ride very slowly indeed. Maybe it's all tied together....Afraid to brake, afraid to go fast...Odd. Very odd.