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Most people are right handed perhaps? Front brake is most effective, rear derailleur is used much more often than front. Most used brake and shifter on stronger hand
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If the rear brake lever is on the left hand side, why does the shifter for rear gears on the right hand side?
Euro style is left hand front brake & front derailleur, right hand rear brake & rear derailleur. Makes sense to me. Blame Brexit! Makes the front brake cabling neater as well (on side pull rim brake bikes).
Only argument 'against' it I can think of is that on motorcycles the right lever is the front brake. But I don't ride motorcycles so that's no problem for me.
Jan Heine has this to say about it:
Early bikes had only a rear brake. In France, this usually was a rim brake. The early brakes were not very powerful, so you needed lots of hand power to stop the bike. Most people are right-handed, and it made sense to control the single brake with the right hand. When front brakes were added to bikes sometime in the 20th century, this required adding a brake lever to the handlebars. In France, the right side was taken, so they mounted the extra lever on the left.
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PhilDAS
Tijs
@ExTra
Cheers everyone for the Nitto / Simworks suggestions, but my heart is now settled on the Ritchey kit now... :-)
Erm... I have a stupid question, which I have never really thought about as I have never had 1 x gears bike... so it's either 1 gear = no shifter or many gears = shifters on both side...
If the rear brake lever is on the left hand side, why does the shifter for rear gears on the right hand side? Is it becuase most part of the world in fact have the rear brake level on the right? Or am I missing something?