a quick survey:
I get about one flat per year, or one flat per 6000 commute miles.
So the average distance between flats is about 6000 miles.
I have a mtn bike with rear panniers, 26" x 1.95" Specialized Armadillo tires, extra thick slime tubes.
I have a flat city commute, but sometimes hit something in the road causing a slow leak.
I would like to go faster, but I do not want to get more flats, especially at night and in bad weather.

What are other people getting with their setups?

I've had two flats in the last 4000 or so miles.

Well actually four because both times I did not pinpoint the cause (embedded thorn or glass in the tire casing) and got another flat the next day. Fortunately, these were of the go to ride home and find your tire flat variety and the leak was slow enought that I could pump up the tire and ride home (and inspect it more closely).

Paul

I'm not saying. Every experienced commuter knows that talking about how long you have gone since your last flat invokes the wrath of the flat gods. If I say, I will surely get a flat on the way home tonite.

Vittoria XN CX tires with thinwall tubes.

About once a year commuting, slightly more often if I go off-roading.

Knock on wood.

This isn't comparable between people. It's as much about the roads as anything.

I moved about 15 months ago, have the same distance commute to the same destination and get about 1/4 the number of flats now.

For me, it's very rare to get a flat while riding (i.e. something that requires a roadside repair). I got my first in 1989, another in 1999, and one last year. I figure I'm good for another 9 years at this rate. I don't know how many miles I rode during that time since I didn't start keeping track until mid-2008. In 2009, I rode 7939 miles and I've done a little over 2000 miles so far this year. Over this period, I've lived on the east coast (1989), west coast (1999), and europe (at present).

I don't know if that's just good luck or a combination of risk-mitigating factors. I'm light-weight, but I ride fairly wide tires (28-37mm). Although I've ridden road and mountain bikes in the past, I always seem to come back to comfortable touring models. I usually buy high-end, flat-resistant tires (currently from the schwalbe marathon family) and change them whenever they look worn (about every 5-10k miles). Of course, I also try to avoid broken glass and other debris and ride mostly on clean paved roads. If I run over glass, I stop and brush off my tires before continuing again. I don't make a habit of skidding and rarely jump curbs. In short, pretty boring stuff, but the tires hold up well.

A lot goes into flats. When my wife and I got our road bikes, they both came with Continental UltraSports. She never rode without me but I often rode without her. Even riding more, on the same roads and carrying 80 more pounds, I got about 1/5 as many flats as she did. I switched both bikes to UltraGatorskins last year and haven't flatted since.

I am running 700x28 Forte GT2/K tires from Performance along with thorn-resistant tubes on my commuter. A year and a half (about 2K miles) and still no flats.

Are you just counting flats caused by road debris or including things like tubes getting pinched between tire and rim due to poor installation (not that this applies to me) ?

With my flat resistant 23 mm tires I get less than a flat a year as long as they aren't reaching the end of their life. This is without any slime or liners. With the stock tires that came on that bike I got about 1 flat a month.

I haven't compiled enough data to be stastically significant. I could get two flats tomorrow and it would throw everything off.

It varies, I've had as little as a millisecond between flats and over a year between flats.

I was simply curious about how often commuters got flats, not trying to make and statistically meaningful conclusions.

Of course, there are so many variables.
In my area, some paths and streets get thorns in the late summer, wind blows them into the bike lane and when they land, one spike points straight up. Once in a particular 100 ft section of paved trail, I suddenly had 10 to 20 punctures in each tire! I'm talking about knobby 2" dia tires. For these thorns, slime can help by plugging most leaks, if you stop, remove the thorns before they have broken off, then re-pump the tire and spin it.
Now with the Kevlar belts in the tires, I have very few flats.

I'm hearing that most people do not get many flats, that's good.

I think average distance is an incomplete picture. After all, in the past 6 months I've gotten maybe 12 flats. However, all of those flats were within the same week. Average is 250 miles per flat, but median is probably less than 5. Mode would be close to 1 or 2. The standard deviation (at rough estimate) is close to 600.

Come to think of it, statistically, I think the 1500 miles can be readily dismissed as an outlier, and eliminated with a Q-test. Apparently, I flat every time I ride my bike...this is news to me.

Statistics are fun!

Once a year or even less and I ride at least 8 miles each way every day through city streets covered with junk, glass, debris. There are some really tough tires out there, so there is no reason to suffer frequent flats on your commute where a little extra weight or drag shouldn't matter.

BTW, I concluded that Armadillos aren't that good after all, there are much better tires out there. I used less known Maxxis Re-Fuse and man, those things really refused to get punctured, freaking unbelievable. No flats, I was getting flats with Armadillos.

Since changing to Specialized Armadillo tires on my commuting bike, no flats. 2 years and about 6000 miles.

I've got a Maxxis Refuse tires on both bikes and never flatted.

42 flats in 28,590 miles

It's odd, I never seem to have the same flat twice, and I get some weird ones. Ihave to go back to 2005 to find a conventional puncture flat in my records.

Here's my record back to that point:

March 27 of 2009, I hit a field of large stones in the middle of a gravel road at night and got a pinch flat.
September 17 of 2008, an old tire a friend gave me blew out on the side with no warning, not caused by a road hazard.
June 10, 2008, a really old patch on a really old tube cracked due to drying out.
Nov 5, 2007 - rim tape shifted after putting on studded tires, caused a flat.
Sept 27 2006 - valve stem just separated, no reason.
July 15, 2005 - piece of glass.

You guys, um... kept record of your flats... for years?

I refuse to divulge this information. It always brings bad luck. Let me hint that it's been a while.

Last year between 4 guys at work we had 16 flats in 12,123 m for 758m per flat.

I personally had 8 flats in 4182m for 522m/per

I got my only - so far- flat this year at 69m

Commuting in the urban trash strew city streets mostly

It seems to skip years.

One year, I'll have 5-6 flats just during the 'normal accepted riding season' (spring break until Labor Day, around here). The next, maybe 1. Now, add in the fact that I ride at least 10-1/2 months out of the year, and I think I'm actually doing pretty well.

Having said that, now I'm sweating a little -- I had one flat over the last 19 months.

I'm not really much of a recordkeeper, but I jot down my experiences in LiveJournal and have since before this stupid FaceBook thing existed. I put tags in, like "tires, flat, odometer, chain, brakes" - so to get my info on flats, I just went to LJ and clicked on the "flat" tag, and there are all my journal entries for the last 5 years on flat tires.

There are people around here who keep track of every foot they travel on a bike and exactly what they ate every day. Heck, I don't doubt that some of them could give you the GPS elevation and speed graphs for a ride they took 5 years ago. Keeping track of a few flat tires is nothing in comparison.

for me, having commuted since last June, I had only one very slow leak. I have 26/1.75 T-serves on my rigid MTB; but before I upgraded to those I just ran on my stock tires (1.95). Between May and June (non-commuting) I had two flats... I blame that partly on noob inexperience, meanwhile I learned to stay away from alley ways in Chicago. On my second bike that I have now since January I upgraded to Marathon Pluses, and no problems so far.

Edit: Rough estimate would be 2400 miles since last June.

So far I have only had a flat on the bottom of my tire....

Running MTB tires and is around 500miles between flats.

On my Michelin Krylion 23C tires I've flatted once. But it was on the second ride! Not a great start However, the culprit was a shard of class shaped somewhat like an arrow head. I'm pretty sure it could've flatted just about any road tire. I've since put on about 2000 flat free km.