Originally Posted by
NOS88
My experience has been that control has less to do with handlebar width and more to do with my overall fore aft balance on the bike. Remember that shifting weight is the primary way we steer. Rarely do we steer with the bars.
Halfway there.
What we do use the bars for is balance. That wobble you see in tire tracks is due to the constant sawing back and forth on the bars that we must to do maintain our balance. A bike that doesn't pivot at the headset is not rideable since it's impossible to keep your balance. Narrower bars require less movement to achieve this, wider bars require larger movements.
When I switched to narrower bars it took me a while to learn how to keep my balance with smaller hand movements. For a short while, I was weaving quite a bit.
This, I think, is why people think wider bars are more stable and that they have more control--larger hand movements, larger margin for error.