How To: Tape your bicycle handlebars

I prefer the old school method, where you wrap from the center towards the bar ends. It's even less likely to unravel, especially if you wrap from front to back over the bars, and it doesn't need electrical tape, so it looks a lot better. I think bike shops probably started wrapping from the ends to the middle when aero brake levers became popular - so that they didn't have to unwrap the entire bar to replace cables. Now that bar end shifters are coming into fashion, they'll probably go back to the old tried and true method of wrapping, since with bar end shifters, you have to remove all the tape anyway.