Originally Posted by staehpj1

I am in the "nothing" camp as well. Cables just don't fail suddenly and without warning. I just keep an eye on cables for wear and replace them preemptively. I don't bother with spares. Nothing wrong with carrying them if you choose to, but I tend to count grams so they don't make the cut and a cable cutter certainly doesn't for me.

Some brifters do make it hard to see the problem area for wear and fraying so be careful to inspect there. In many hundreds of thousands of miles of riding I have had one "almost" cable failure. That one left me with a barely functioning shifter for a while. That was how I first learned about the need to watch brifters for cable wear at the tight bend in the brifter housing on some brifters. If it had failed I would have rigged it to be in one gear of my choice on that deraillerur and shifted the other derailleur only until the next parts source. A broken brake cable is a lot less likely, but in a pince and with care I figure you can limp along with one brake. Maybe on a tandem that is less true, but have you ever actually broken a brake cable that wasn't really badly neglected or abused?

That said, if I did carry spares, I'd either roll up the extra length or take spares precut to length.