Have been out riding with some local guys a few times, one of them has a tri-glide he bought second hand. The original owner had a prosthetic right leg, so he had the brakes modified so both the front and rear operate from the brake lever on the handlebars. It is set up 60/40, with more braking to the front I believe. It got me wondering why not just do that as stock, one less pedal. After all, on cars we don't brake the front and rear separately. Just a pondering.

 

HD has been providing linked brakes, as part of the ABS package, for several years. The hand brake activates front and rear...with more force in front. The brake pedal still operates just the rear, as there are times when only the rear is desired...such as slow speed maneuvers.

 

Ah ok makes sense, didn't know that has been available for a long time. And now that you mention it yes makes sense that at times a person would just want the rear brakes.

 

The rear brake also activates the front brake after a certain speed.

 

The linked brakes come in above a certain speed and go back to separate below a certain speed. I don't recall the actual speeds. A trike, like a car, doesn't tend to fall over as easily as a motorcycle. The individual control of front and rear brakes is a necessity depending on the situation you find yourself in during braking. A fully linked all the time system could have detrimental consequences.

 

the foot pedal will operate both front and rear, except that if using only the foot, only one front rotor will operate. under 25 mph, the brakes are not linked.

 

Back in the 1980's, I knew a racer that injured his right leg also. He used the front brake lever to apply both brakes. If I remember right, he used a long banjo bolt to connect both front & rear to the M/C. It was 50/50. It worked quite well as he had 2 rotors up front with a single rotor out back.

 

It has been a legal requirement to have two separate braking systems on vehicles for many years. The single foot brake in a car actually operates two parallel systems, in addition there is a parking brake.

There have been coupled brakes on bikes in the past. Moto Guzzi and Kawasaki certainly tried them out, however they still had two braking systems. The foot brake on a Guzzi operated the rear and one front brake, with a balancing system, the other front brake was operated by the hand lever.

If you take a close look at a Harley trike's front brakes you will find they are 6-pot, however 4-pots operate on one line, the other pair operate on another.

 

Because physics i guess

 

Also it's a safety thing. Cars originally had a single master cylinder but if you had a brake leak you basically had no brakes. So they doubled them and separated them so in case of a failure you had fronts or rears. Bikes probably followed suit plus the handling characteristics of bikes sometimes requires separate systems.