Correct tread pattern and pressure for conditions will make a significant difference in rolling resistance, far more than just about every other tire property (weight, suppleness, etc). Different conditions require different tread patterns and different tire pressures. As for weight, you’ll save maybe 100g of weight per tire, which is admittedly amplified due to rolling. Drop a single water bottle and you’ll be back on top. You won’t of course find many “performance” bikes with wire beaded tires.
Most paved paths are best paired with slicks/semi-slicks, even when wet (snow/ice is a separate discussion). Yet many hybrid/city bikes are equipped with a bit of tread depth. The tradeoff is durability and puncture resistance - slicks/semi-slicks can’t compete. And for people buying these types bikes, it is far more important that they reliably get from point A to point B without any flats or maintenance costs than saving a minute off their daily commute, so it is a fair trade off.
As for tubeless setups, I would hesitate to recommend those to anyone that needs this site (not that you’re suggesting that). If you don’t know what tire you need I would be willing to bet you have no idea how to fix a tubeless puncture, top up sealant, or remove/reinstall the tire.
I think it's interesting to have observed the changes over the years. Before it was about having as thin tires as possible, pumped as hard as possible. Then one realized that only gives a low rolling resistance on perfectly even surface, something softer can absorb more of the little bumps (and also perhaps not fatigue the rider as much from a bumpy ride). Then bytul vs latex vs tpu tubes. Or go entirely tubeless is in vogue lately, often with wider tires and less air in them.
There are other trade offs than rolling resistance. Like puncture resistance, grip/cornering ability, aerodynamics, weight etc. that also comes into account when choosing a tire setup.
And tubeless tires with a good sealant allow you to have all the benefits of flexible tires (rolling efficiency and light weight) without any of this fancy mumbo-jumbo. I've been running tubeless tires within racing casings for years on the mean streets of Seattle and I have never had a puncture stop a ride. In theory a really big puncture could take out my tire, but most of the problems are due to small things (glass, wire etc.).
In addition to your comments I would recommend that people upgrading or shopping for tires for a road/city bike familiarize themselves with bead types and tire weights.
Something like a "cheap" 700C 28mm tire with a wire bead can be quite a lot heavier than a folding bead (kevlar) more expensive road tire such as one that costs $55-70 per tire. Additionally there is a big difference in the quality of the compound used in the rubber for a cheap tire vs an expensive road tire. There are also specialty city oriented tougher tires like the gatorskip series that sacrifice some grip and cornering ability for purported resistance to punctures, also at the expense of being heavier.
If you ride regularly and have something like a flat bar road bike, and change the tires from 28mm cheap/wire bead to folding bead, you will IMMEDIATELY notice the difference in pedaling effort and cruising speed , subjectively measured by your own effort on a flat/level road, average effort, no wind.
You can feel this in the tire weight if you take the old wire bead tire off your bike and hold it one hand, and hold the unfolded new folding bead tire in your other hand.
If you're using tubes there are also a number of benefits to be found from using the proper size/diameter range of tube, correct valve stem length of tube for your rim, and quality material tube. A good quality tube will cost a few dollars more than a cheap generic one. Using the example above of a 28mm road tire the appropriate size range of tube should be marked on its box from 25-32mm.
One other thought on rim type: If you are buying a $1700+ road bike new these days it most likely will come with a tube-using setup, but the rims will have the "new" square profile for bead lock that is also compatible for upgrade in the future to a tubeless tire setup with special rim strip and sealant. Older 700C clincher wheel sets generally are not compatible with the square profile bead lock required for tubeless. Newer 700C wheelsets should be compatible with conventional tube-using clincher beads as well as tubeless.
Terminology: To avoid confusion, tubeless and tubular are two different things. You're very unlikely to see tubular (glued directly to rim) tires in 2022 unless you're a professional, extremely serious about triathlons.
Bike shops make like $0.25 on a tube, there is little profit in them and you are conflating tires and tubes. Any proper touring tire will be very puncture resistant if you don't mind the increased rolling resistance, I have only gotten one flat with Marathon Mondial's and that was an installation failure, my fault.
Re: the weight of a water bottle, rotating weight is very different than static weight.
My experience with 28-32mm sizes tires on pavement in an urban environment has been that tires with tread on them actually have much less overall grip and cornering ability. This seems to correlate with data I've seen from third parties measuring the actual square mm area of a typical "contact patch" between tire and pavement. It seems counter intuitive, because on a car you want and need tires that aren't bald. But on a city/road bike, the best possible performance on pavement in the size range of 23-32mm with seems to be gained by having a treadless tire with a grippy compound.
Tubeless tires and the kind of stiff, slippery, puncture resistant tires GP is talking about (Gatorskins or Marathons) are somewhat orthogonal. Tubeless certainly helps! I ride tubeless Conti GP5000s (which have fantastic ride quality) personally, but they would not work well if I was constantly riding in glass. (I also regularly go thousands of miles without flatting, but that is in large part because I don’t have to ride through broken glass.)
Have you been converted to the cult of tubeless tires? They truly are remarkable. I ride on sharp limestone and thru hedgeapple rows, and the fact these things hold any sort of air after a ride is truly amazing. I was so mesmerized by the performance on my mountain bike, my 'city' bike now sports tubeless rims and tires. I haven't had a flat yet! (knock on wood, headed to Bentonville next weekend).
To me, this problem is mostly 'solved' unless there's a generation leap in weight savings. My tires weigh .65kg each (and thats light for MTB)! That's a lot of rotating mass that's also unsprung on the suspension.
Flats are a huge pain in the ass. With practice you can get used to changing a tube in a few minutes but it's never fun and kind of kills your workout.
Here are a few tips. For training rides use thicker tubes and puncture resistant tires such as Continental Gatorskin; they will slow you down a little but when riding for exercise that doesn't matter. Don't try to patch a tube in the field; carry a spare tube as a replacement and then maybe patch the puncture later when you get home. Carry a pair of disposable gloves to keep the grime off your hands. Use CO2 inflator cartridges instead of struggling with a portable air pump.
I know some cyclists like self-sealing tubeless tires now. Those may work well for road racing or mountain biking, but they're not great for road training rides. I've had friends get stranded several times because the sealant didn't work as advertised.
That’s exactly my point :) Puncture resistance may be improved with more aggressive tread but handling and rolling resistance will definitely suffer. It’s all about the amount of contact patch on the ground. Same reason why on ice you want to run very shallow tread while on snow or mud you want a very aggressive tire. You can correlate this with slick car race tire vs a rally tire. One is great on road while the other wouldn’t get you far.
For a fun experiment, head out on a wet day and try to corner on both 28mm slicks and 33mm+ tires with a decent amount of tread (bonus points if you use a mud CX tread). Personal experience dictates that aggressive tread will treat you to a good dose of road rash while slicks will continue to grip far longer. I’ve far more experience with this than I should (one should be plenty).
Whilst I agree with it not being the way to deal with debris, tubeless tyres have great ride quality and can shrug off most punctures. Their only downsides are excessive cost, expertise needed to install/change them and occasionally getting squirted with sealant if a hole doesn't seal immediately.
Topping up, reseating? My experience with tubeless (on a mountain bike) is that I buy a new set of tires, pour some sealant in (Stan's NoTubes), put them on a bike and then ride until there's no tread left. I don't think I've ever had the sealant dry up. And that's with a regular rim meant to be used with tubes, converted to tubeless with an aftermarket kit.
I agree with having to carry a tube or two in case the tire fails catastrophically, but other than that I consider tubeless bulletproof. No experience with touring though.
Folks want to run tires at lower pressures, but this increases the risk of pinch flats for inner tubes when the rim bottoms out against the ground. Tubeless setups don't have this risk.
My experience with tubeless is that once I found a good setup, it's set and forget. I don't get punctures (none at all), maybe once a week top up the pressure, once a year top up the milk and that's it.
It was like that with Panaracer GK+ tyres, but they have to be under pressure when I don't ride for longer periods, otherwise there are issues. Now I use Pirelli Cinturato Velo tlr and it's the best tyre I ever had.
On my tubed bike, other than 1 or 2 flats in the last 5 years, these tires have required 0 maintenance. Even after dusting the bike off from the winter, they pump right up and are ready to go.
My tubeless tires are a constant source of headache. They are constantly going flat, sometimes weekly, requiring more sealant, stuck valve cores, etc.
Overall, I'd say my tubeless tires require monthly maintenance, while my tubed tires have basically never required any thought at all. What am I missing here?
Narrow tyres tubeless is a no-go as the high-psi required to get the tyre seated and shaped can cause blowouts, especially if you get impact such as a pothole.
Going for wider tyres means you naturally can go lower PSI, but if you drop PSI with tubes you risk pinch-flats ('snakebites'), where striking a hard edge causes both edges of the tyre to puncture (like X___X on the cross section, rather than \__x_/ of a normal puncture). If you go wide, you can then drop the pressure more as you don't have a tube to pinch. This gives you the great comfort, the pliability to absorb road imperfection (which improves speed), and less likelihood of puncture.
As an approximate pressure guide:
# weight in kg. front load probably 0.45 (45%). tyre width in mm
weight_front = weight * front_wheel_load
weight_rear = weight * (1 - front_wheel_load)
psi_front = (338.14 * weight_front / tyre_width ** 1.5785) - 7.1685
psi_rear = (338.14 * weight_rear / tyre_width ** 1.5785) - 7.1685
This should ballpark you 15% tyre deflection under load, which was a guide from an old bike magazine on a balance of rolling resistance and comfort.
That’s interesting. On my mountain bike that (used to) get a lot of constant use, tubeless was much better than my old MTV with tubes. When the tubes get a flat it is a whole process to get it patched, but tubeless both seem to get less flats and seal better with whatever I put in them.
That being said, tubeless tires do require being used fairly regularly, which includes pumping them up (just topping them off) almost every time you go out. Right now I haven’t gone mountain biking in quite a while so I guarantee that my tires are flat
Most paved paths are best paired with slicks/semi-slicks, even when wet (snow/ice is a separate discussion). Yet many hybrid/city bikes are equipped with a bit of tread depth. The tradeoff is durability and puncture resistance - slicks/semi-slicks can’t compete. And for people buying these types bikes, it is far more important that they reliably get from point A to point B without any flats or maintenance costs than saving a minute off their daily commute, so it is a fair trade off.
As for tubeless setups, I would hesitate to recommend those to anyone that needs this site (not that you’re suggesting that). If you don’t know what tire you need I would be willing to bet you have no idea how to fix a tubeless puncture, top up sealant, or remove/reinstall the tire.
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