Originally Posted by
DogBoy
I see a lot of folks say they have luck with the skinny tires in winter but they have never worked well for me. I use 1.9 to 2" mud tires. They are big enough that they don't get too squishy in the biscuit dough, and they still sink enough to get traction on the slush over the ice. I fell a couple of times on ice-under biscuit dough a few years ago and so I now use 2" studded tires and won't look back. They are pricy though, so don't buy them until you know you will use them.
We may also be riding in different environments - my commute is in a pretty urban/not quite suburban area. The streets do get ploughed, not always 100% but I'm seldom riding on severe buildups of snow/ice/etc - if I'm in deeper snow it is usually freshly fallen. The ice to pavement ratio over the winter is high enough that I never tried studded tires, they would be wasted on me. For me though, the thinner tires have worked better than what I used before (knobbies that came with the bike and 26x2.0 IRC Metro), and they are not >really< thin like on a road bike (26x1.5). If the OP is going to be riding in snow/ice more of the time something else may work better for him. I was just trying to say, don't rule those thin tire bikes out just based on first impressions, they may work better than he thinks.