90% of your braking 'power' comes from the front brake. Under hard braking in ideal conditions, this is closer to 100%. You can safely remove the rear brake from most bikes. This is a common misconception [1]. The same is true for motorcycles.
You want to cover the non-ideal circumstances too. Wet leaves, gravel, snow/ice will make the front wheel slip out from under you if you only have a front brake.
(This bike does have a rear brake too, so it's fine)
Edit: About winter biking, cables tend to freeze in the winter if you're not meticulous about maintenance. So automatic gears and coaster rear brake are good for this reason too.
Breaking at similar speed on the rear brakes will cause a fishtail and slide rather than brake. I'd rather endo (flip over my handlebars) than ride in front of a car.
Never had that happen to me in over 35 years of riding bikes. I do go over the handlebars occasionally. I have had the front wheel slide from under me a few times as well (my least favorite way of falling). I even ride with a low tread back tyre so I can slide the back wheel around a bit on trails.
Maybe you instinctively apply appropriate pressure using the front brake.
If you slam on the rear brake only or simply much harder than the front brake, the rear wheel locks up before coming to a stop. The bike will continue forward with the front wheel rolling and the rear wheel sliding. If there's slight braking on the front wheel, the rear starts sliding around the front, twisting the cyclist.
That is not a misconception at all, at least not for bicycles, and it's highly dangerous to suggest so.
Have you ever tried braking while going down a steep hill? (e.g. San Fran hills?) You know, to stay at a safe speed? Front brake will flip you over in an instant, I know because I've done it, even at slow speeds, when my rear brake cable snapped. After a couple tries I walked home, since bicycling without a rear brake was clearly suicidal.
And your linked article just talks about the rider flying over the handlebars because the rider isn't "bracing themselves against deceleration" -- whatever that means. I'm talking about the bike itself flipping.
> Front brake will flip you over in an instant, I know because I've done it, even at slow speeds
That's because you simply do not know how to ride a bicycle. In such a situation you need to get your weight back behind the saddle and modulate the application of the brake.
O.P. is one hundred percent correct that you do not need a rear brake -- and I speak as someone that rode for several years in without one including in SF.
I "simply don't know how to ride a bicycle?" That's a big assumption you're making there, buddy.
I don't know how your particular weight is distributed on your particular bicycle or what, but you're spreading dangerously wrong ideas.
If you're going downhill and a child runs out in the street from between cars and you need to stop, and you're a normal person on a normal bike, you need a rear brake, end of story.
If you modulate your front brake to not lock up, that simply means you stop far too slowly, and hit the kid. Even at what seems like otherwise a safe speed, things (like children, or soccer balls) can run out in front of you at the last second and you need to stop suddenly.
You absolutely need a rear brake for safety. Just because you could get by without one in most situations doesn't mean you can get by without one in all situations.
If you're going down a hill and you need to do an emergency stop, the back wheel won't do you any good. The rule of thumb I was taught was that the back wheel will only provide 1G of deceleration, under ideal circumstances. If the road is wet, or there are leaves, assume less.
If anything, the rear brake can be used to slightly pump up the front fork, which allows the front wheel to find its own way through mud/leaves/snow. Basically, apply a touch of rear brake when you go through a slippery curve, squeeze the frame between your thighs, and let the bike find its own path.
If you take into account that during braking, and even more so during an emergency brake, all the inertial weight lies on the front wheel, it makes a lot of sense that the rear brake is so useless.
In France, bikers call their passengers "SDS," which stands for "sac de sable" (sandbag). Very useful to increase grip of the back wheel when accelerating strongly. Not when braking.
While I'm sure you've ridden lots, if you experiment a bit and try different braking techniques you'll learn how much more effective the front brake is. In fact the famous "fear of endo" is actually just a symptom of this: when the bike stops suddenly rather than slowly, some riders find they don't have their COG positioned far enough back to stay over the stopped bike. One never gets that with a rear brake, because as soon as the COG starts moving forward as it must when the bike slows, the rear tire rises off the ground and the rear brake no longer helps. On steeps, I often have my stomach rather than my butt on the saddle, because I want to be able to stop quickly without flipping.
I've actually faced the "child jumping out from behind a parked car" before, and I passed that test. When I jammed hard on both the front and rear, both tires locked, the rear tire swung around the side until even with the front (at that point it was no longer behind the COG so it rotated down instead of up), and I twisted my back foot to unclip and stomp. I looked at her, she looked at me, then she ran on across the street. Glad I wasn't driving a car!
Since you seem to be unable to see that the issue has not been "decided" as you think it is, especially as there are different bicycle types and different body types, I'll leave these quotes here from [1] and [2] so that other people can be safely warned:
"You should always apply the rear brake, and slightly in advance of the front brake, so that a slight skid at the rear will warn you if you get close to the hazard point at which the bike may tip."
"Flat asphalt is one thing, 30 degrees sloped rocky road is another. My hold is that in the second case the back brake is MORE important than the front brake."
"I myself got into the accident once. It happens so fast that you never have time to lean your body backwards and provide more tractions for the rear wheel like other have stated."
"Depending on where your center of mass "hovers" over your bike, you may need a different strategy."
"Having had more than a few over-the-handlebar incidents back in the day, there is no situation in which I would ever even consider using only the front brake again."
"On the road bike you are alot lower and therefore don't go over the front quite as quickly."
"If you learn to move your weight back (ideally behind your saddle) during strong braking then going over the handle bars is nearly impossible (except under very steep hills)." (Note the "steep hills" part, which is my whole point about safety.)
"On mountain bike, the momentum partly transferred to seat and pedal as a result from a more up-right pedalling position. Remember that your body is about 3-5 times the weight of the bicycle, and they are on top of the bike. So the higher you are from the ground, the easier for you to toppled up."
None of those quotes demonstrate anything other than the simple point that someone who has experience in riding a bicycle knows to get their weight back and low so that (per your own quote) it is _nearly impossible_ even on steep hills to endo.
It would be refreshing if you were able to demonstrate a capacity for admitting that perhaps you have something to learn. I would advise taking a mountain bike class and coupling it with something like the U.K.'s Bikeability or the U.S.A.'s League of American Bicyclists equivalent.
I fear, instead, that you will spend your time hectoring internet strangers about the dangers of bicycle riding based on your own incapacities and incapabilities.
You need a rear brake for two reasons. One is redundancy: if the front brake fails, you want another option, even if it's not quite as good. The other is spreading the braking heat over twice as much surface area on long fast descents. (Some tandems have a third brake for that reason.)
The redundancy point is true. The tandem drum brakes are less to do about heat dissipation than stopping your hands cramp up on a long descent. Often you just actuate the rear drum to provide constant drag on a descent.
For anyone interested, specialist tandem outfitters used to shave off the heat dissipation fins on old-style Arai drum brakes. The point of said brakes was not to dissipate heat, but to stop the tandem. It is true that very old tandems with rim brakes had heat-dissipation problems.
Brakes are not digital - they can be modulated. Front flips happen only to people that are not used to their brake or fully pull the brake lever out of some shock reaction.
I'm riding downhill with my bikes, and I can safely do that with front brake only as long as that thing doesn't overhead. Even things like front-only braking on steep stairs is no problem with the correct body position (not over the front wheel) and brake force applied.
Yup. Same principle for older pre-anti lock brakes on cars, if you lived in a place with regular snowfall, learning not to lock the brakes was considered a basic part of learning to drive.
I have been riding for 15 years without a rear brake and have never come close to going over the front. Not that I would recommend it to other folks, the redundancy argument is valid, but it is not unsafe at all.
People get flipped by the front brake because it is more powerful, they are not used to the stopping power. You have to brace against the handlebars.
It is more powerful because as the bike rocks forward the wheel is pushed into the ground and has more friction with the surface. The rear brake will loose grip under braking because it rises up from the ground. Aggressive braking in the rear is more dangerous because the wheel can lock up and skid, which can send you over the handlebars. The back brake tends to be setup to be more relaxed to stop people doing this. Maybe that is why people think it is safer.
With a bit of practice you can get much better braking force from a front brake. Try it out on some grass, and see how far you take it before the back wheel starts to rise. You will find that you can stop much faster, which will make you safer. Just try it and see.
My personal strategy for front-wheel braking is to apply as little as possible, and "pump" the brakes like you have to do in a pre-ABS car. You're much less likely to flip.
Sounds like your brakes had no modulation or you weren't using them safely. Modern disc brakes eliminate the modulation issue.
Bike brakes aren't a binary system. You can adjust your touch on the brake levers to apply varying levels of friction against the braking surface to shave off speed.
Maybe I just don't know what modulation means, but I figure it's when you pump the brakes to prevent skidding. How do disk brakes eliminate the need for it?
HN wouldn't let me reply yesterday so I edited my response into the parent comment.
Bike brakes aren't a binary system. You can adjust your touch on the brake levers to apply varying levels of friction against the braking surface to shave off speed. Hope this helps!
It’s a consequence of the geometry of a pushbike: The centre of gravity of bike + rider is above the point about which the bike will rotate when braking (The front axle). This means that any braking load will put a torque on the bike that pushes down on the front wheel & lifts the back wheel up. This places a limit on how hard you can brake with the rear brake, i.e. the point at which the upward torque reduces the friction between the rear wheel and the road so that no greater braking force can be applied - at this point the wheel locks & just skids along the road surface.
When you use the front brake, you can brake harder because this torque is pushing the front wheel into the ground. Instead, the limit on front wheel braking is the torque required to toss the rider over the handlebars. This is a function of their weight & how far back behind the saddle they can get their backsides:)
(This second limit means that a car can significantly outbrake a cyclist. Bicycles need more stopping distance than cars do if they need to carry out an emergency stop.)
