Originally Posted by
Tourist in MSN
That said, the wider the tire the greater chance that you will run over a puncture causing item on the road. If you ride 50 miles and have a contact patch of a half inch (I am guessing that my rear 700cX37mm tire at 87psig has a contact patch that wide), your tire rolled over 11,000 square feet of road. A contact patch of three quarters of an inch wide (I am guessing my 26X2.0 rear tire patch width at 4.5 atm is 3/4 inch) is 50 percent wider and therefore you have a greater chance of rolling over something to cause a puncture.
this is an interesting statement--some of you read of me getting a new pair of regular old Marathons 368s? last week for my mtn bike. The following day I obviously ran over a narrow grey nail about 2 inches long and the front tire must have grabbed it and tossed it up into my rear, which it skewered like a harpoon into a whale (didnt rip it though, just a hole)
Now, I realize serendipity happens, but as I ride on Montreal streets all the time and have for 25 years now, I do wonder if the fresh "grippy" tread of the 1.5 Marathons was partly responsible, more so than the more "slickish" old Nimbus that I had on it before--and so picking up the nail more than my old tires would have (and more so even than the 700x28s that I have had on my other bikes for all these years too)
I also realize that there is no answer to my wondering, but it is funny that after years of street riding, this happened with the new tires. This model of Marathon
http://www.schwalbetires.com/bike_ti...s/marathon_368
does have more tread blocks than the Nimbus's, and while this is just an idea in my head, I would say that a more slick tire might be better for actually rolling over stuff than stuff getting picked up in "blocks"
That said, I can see how a tire with more tread blocks will help with little tiny glass shards NOT reaching the spaces in between.
In any case, while the OP was asking 2 vs 1.5, this did make me wonder about my new 1.5s, which are wider than the old Nimbus Armadillo 1.5 on it before, and all wider than the 700x28s Ive used so much.
(and yes, this theory is completely ignoring the tread characteristics, thickness, super duper liner thingees in some tires etc)