Originally Posted by
Maelochs
This is actually the quintessence of all the arguments here.
"I reject your reality and substitute my own."
This is the text version of sticking one's fingers in one's ears and chanting to avoid hearing unpleasant facts.
Then there is this: "Almost nothing" is more than zero, so by your own admission, even if someone is so inept as to be unable to brake properly, the rear brake is still helping slow the bicycle ... you counter all your own arguments right there.
Yeah, but @
terrymorse just told me it does have some effect ......
And then there is this gem:
Yes folks, @
terrymorse did indeed completely negate all his arguments in this post. Yes, he freely admitted that the rear brake played a role in stopping, and that a rider could learn to brake properly using both brakes.
The funniest part is that he ignored his own post and went on to argue against what he said here in several more posts.
I find the idea of practicing emergency stopping pretty funny. The biggest variable in coming out of a sudden stop is your position on the bike, far more important than anything you're actually doing with the brakes, and by its very nature, you don't know ahead of time what position you'll be on the bike when you have to slam the brake(s). I don't think anyone is capable of disregarding the knowledge that they're about to slam the brakes during a practice run. Your body is going to make all sort of adjustments prior to this slam that you won't even be aware of.
I also don't think that practicing slamming the brakes is a good idea for another reason--it's almost never the best reaction to a real-world situation and I suspect you're just conditioning yourself to commit to it too easily. I can think of literally dozens of near-misses where I would have definitely gotten hurt if my first reaction was to hit the brake, evasion is almost always the better strategy and braking interferes with that in real time.