A couple of years ago, an acquaintance of mine was riding down a paved trail in local canyon when someone stepped out in front of him. He hit the brakes, did an end-over-end (endo), and broke his neck. He is now completely paralyzed from the neck down. Sometime later, my 25-yr-old daughter was taken to the ER with a head injury. She remembered nothing of the accident, but her injuries (concussion and scraped forearms) indicate an endo. She had been coming downhill on her bike at the time. Also in the ER was a woman with a broken arm. She had been riding along when a bee flew into her face. She hit the brakes and did an endo.

All this led me to wonder how safe modern bicycles are. I experimented first with my daughter's bike: rolled along at about 2 mph and slammed on the brakes. Even at that speed, the rear wheel came right off the ground. So I began trying this on other bikes and discovered that many bikes are like this: it is easy to get the rear wheel off the ground by slamming on the brakes. In a panic stop, such bikes would be likely to do an endo.

Now it is true that one can bring such bikes safely to a stop. All you need is the presence of mind to hit the rear brakes first and squeeze gently on the front one. But accidents happen fast, and no one should count on having that sort of presence of mind. In my view, many modern bikes are death traps.

There are two ways to avoid this problem. One approach is to buy a bike with a long wheelbase, a relaxed head tube angle, and plenty of trail in the fork. In other words, a touring bike. (I now ride a Surly Longhaul Trucker.) On this bike, I can't get the rear wheel off the ground no matter how hard I try. The other approach is to put brakes on your bike that can be adjusted, and adjust the front ones so that you can't get the rear wheel off the ground. Cantilever brakes, for example, can be adjusted by changing the angle of the link unit that connects the cable to the levers. So far as I know, V brakes cannot be adjusted. After the accident, I took the V brakes off of my daughter's bike and installed cantis.