Winter tyres for road bike

cococoady

This is probably a stupid question (newbie to cycling :rolleyes:)but i am wondering if there are such things as winter tyres for a road bike.
I have a Lapierre 200 (i think) where the tyres are the bald ones.
I am considering cycling to work daily on it but i don't want to risk using it incase there is frost / ice on the road.
Hope you can help

Cheers
Coco

GTDolanator

three months ago this question wold have been relavent but its february. I cycle at least 60k a day and i havent come across ice and frost on the road in weeks,youl be fine now

cococoady

I seem to remember around this time last year it was snowing and was very icy for ages. It's just i don't want to get into cycling to work only for it to keep being interupted until the good weather comes in. I would be starting at 6.30 am when leaving for work so it will prob be end of march before i'd be sure of no ice / frost. At least if there were winter tyres i could go uninterupted

markdrayton

cococoady wrote: »

I seem to remember around this time last year it was snowing and was very icy for ages. It's just i don't want to get into cycling to work only for it to keep being interupted until the good weather comes in. I would be starting at 6.30 am when leaving for work so it will prob be end of march before i'd be sure of no ice / frost. At least if there were winter tyres i could go uninterupted

Aside from tyres with metal studs (which are expensive and awful when not icy) nothing is much help on ice. Just don't ride when it's icy. It's pretty easy to tell -- if it's been above zero all night you're probably fine. Even when it was bad 6 weeks ago the main roads were generally okay.

Wishbone Ash

cococoady wrote: »

ice / frost. At least if there were winter tyres i could go uninterupted

Winter tyres on a MTB may help in soft snow but no tyre will allow you to go "uninterupted" in ice/frost on a road bike. Bear in mind that at 6.30am it's still dark and difficult to spot slippery patches.

doozerie

The Snow Cycling FAQ has useful information in it.

I've had studded tyres (Schwalbe Marathon Winter) on my MTB for the last couple of months and they are very good. On packed ice they are excellent, on non-icy tarmac they are fine (in contrast to the mention above of them being "awful when not icy" they are really not very different from regular knobbly MTB tyres on dry roads), on shallow snow they are fine, on deep snow they suffer. Basically studded tyres work very well generally, on a par with knobbly tyres on dry roads and on snow, but they excel on ice. As for their effectiveness on frost, I think they help but there is little for the studs to dig into when dealing with a thin layer of frost so you can still find frost patches slippery. Studded tyres are not a magic wand, they won't eliminate the dangers of ice/frost but they certainly reduce the risk of a fall and by a hell of a lot when dealing with packed ice. Adjusting your tyre pressure for the conditions helps too. On dry roads the only thing you really have to be careful of is not hauling on the brakes too suddenly, or pushing too hard into corners, as you can lose studs from the tyres - you can buy replacement studs though. The Schwalbe tyres cost me about 40euro each but I expect them to last several years so longer term they should be good value (in fact, they've already paid for themselves in my view).

I plan to leave the studded tyres on my commute bike until the end of February at the very least, and perhaps a little longer. The roads near me get bad in icy weather and it is all too often a 2 mile cycle to get to the gritted main roads (sometimes my local roads are gritted, but usually not). Even this morning, at 08h30, I encountered frosty patches on the roads in the first couple of miles from my house so we are certainly not finished with slippery roads yet.

NecroSteve

Give this a gawk. Genius! http://www.dutchbikeco.com/_blog/Dutch_Bike_Co_Weblog/post/Seattle_Snowpocalypse/