Recent post have been ... interesting to say the least. Yikes. It is simply not true that tandems have different braking characteristics than single bikes. Anything that moves, be it a car, bus, motorcycle, single bike, tandem ... whatever it is, when the brakes are applied, there is a weight shift towards the front of the vehicle that loads the front tires roughly 66% more than the rear tires! This very week I have been operating our daily driver tandem without the rear brake because of a rear wheel wobble. I have no trouble stopping our ~400lb GVWR rig with a single front v-brake. Would I try that with only a single rear brake??!! Absolutely not.

All DOT legal automobiles have a single foot pedal that controls all the braking. Because of the already mentioned weight shift phenomena, there is built in engineering that reduces the rear braking force to 33% of the total and increases the front braking proportionately. This prevents the rear wheels from locking up (from being unloaded) as the total weight energy shifts forward. Some motorcycles have experimented with such a system. Mostly large touring bikes and heavy cruisers. Tandems could use such a system to very good effect but it's unlikely most Captains would trust it.

It is true that tandems do not endo, like single bikes, if the front wheel is locked. This is NOT because tandems have 75% of the braking in the rear, it is because the center of gravity of the tandem is so much lower than that of a single bike that instead of a force axis that is over the CoG, resulting in a flip, the force axis of a hard stop is parallel to the CG, resulting in a push force that skids the front tires instead. Front tires absolutely do wear out, because front tires do everything rear tires do. Soft rubber compounds spinning against much harder road surface is going to result in tire wear eventually no matter what.