Originally Posted by ItsJustMe

You'd have to know more about that incident. It said he "built the bike up from scratch." What does that mean? Did he grab some crappy brakes off of an old Huffy bike, or did he buy new brakes? What kind of brakes were they? The father said that the bike shop worked on the brakes hours before. Does he KNOW that they worked specifically on the brakes, or did they work on something else? Did they inspect the brakes, and if so, what did they say about them? It's possible they looked at the brakes and told the kid "these brakes suck, you need to fix them" and he said "meh, whatever" and never told his dad. Did he have two sets of brakes, or was this a single speed with coasters, or a fixie with just front brakes?

We just don't know. Without this information, it doesn't really add much to the discussion.

Truth is I trust the brakes on my bike at least as much as the brakes on my car, because in 5 seconds I can inspect everything that there is about the brakes that might fail, and if there's the slightest thing wrong I can probably feel it immediately when I'm using the brakes, far before it becomes dangerous. AND there are two completely independent sets of brakes on almost all bikes.