Commuter tyres - hybrid workhorse vs faster road style?

Low price & dependable. Currently 26" Marathon plus on rear, and 10 year old 26x2.1 tubeless knobbly on the front. Run higher psi than MTB; 60psi rear, about 35-40psi front, helps with speed on roads. Regularly ride through areas with broken glass. Last puncture I had was from a 2" nail about six months ago. Don't need punctures on commutes unless you're the type that thinks its fun to get to work early every day😉

Continental Contact in a tread pattern you prefer. Speed version is real fast, urban and Contact have more tread. 

Tried loads, spent lots of time by the side of the road. Fitted Marathons, punctures a distant memory Better leave early tomorrow then.

GP5000 AS TR, setup tubeless are fast, enduring and resilient.

I can't actually remember what I have on. It's a vittoria. I generally go for tough and puncture resistant. You don't need to go overboard though. There are still faster performing tyres in most ranges. Especially now gravel tyres are an option.
I get hardly any punctures on my road bike riding GP5000s. The roads on my commute aren't really any worse.

Currently GP5000 tubeless on one bike and Conti Gatorskins on the other. No punctures for a goodly while (touches wood).

Ditched the Conti Contact Plus City after two years and zero punctures, they still look brand new but so draggy and slow... 

My commute is about 1.5 hours each way, I'm now all for an enjoyable ride over fighting the tyres to maintain a comfortable pace.

I hate the feel of heavy tyres - much prefer something fast. With tubeless I’ve had 1 puncture in about 4 years so I’m firmly in the camp of using nice tyres now. 

Tubed - Conti 4 seasons, they're not too bad, far better than gatorskins, don't puncture very often, i used to get about 2 a year on mixed commuter/wet training bike. Maybe 6000km a year.

Tubeless i'd just use a "normal" mid range tyre at about £40 a pair and double up on sealant. I can't even remember the last time i punctured with *any* tubeless tyre!

TBH, you can prevent a lot of punctures just giving your tyres a quick wipe whenever you get a chance. Even if it's just when you get on the bike and ready to head off.

I don’t really get to get to commute by bike these days but when I did I always enjoyed the balance of speed/puncture resistance of the continental contact speed tyres. They would normally hold up well (few to no punctures) for a couple of thousand km on a route that would see something like a gator skin puncture about once a week. Shame they don’t do any lighter weight folding options these days. 

I recently bought a pair of Pirelli P zero, 34mm tubeless from bikeinn. They are fast, fairly light but not too light and so far (about 250km mostly road but some east Anglian "gravel") seem really good.

Tread makes no difference at all on a bike unless the ground is soft enough for it to dig into.  The aquaplaning speed for a bike is IIRC the other side of 100mph (although probably lower as tyres have got bigger).

Currently I commute on a Continental Ultra sport 28mm which is just a budget road tyre.  Touch wood it only punctures once in a very long while.   I've had the same (but 25mm) on my road bike all winter and had way too many punctures though so it's obviously route dependent.

My new bike has goodyear connector gravel tyres which I want to swap out for something faster. 

TBH I wouldn't bother.

A faster tyre will maybe add 0.5mph to your average speed. Since roadies dropped the commandment "thou shalt run 23mm tyres" I've used and seen all sorts on club runs, the difference between tyres and wheels isn't enough to actually disrupt the speed/fitness pecking order.  The fast guys are still fast on 40mm tyres they're testing ahead of the P-R sportive, the slow guys are still slow on 23mm tyres.

And that's assuming you went for a fast tyre, not a commuter puncture proof one. Those Goodyears will probably be faster than Marathons, and the puncture resistance is probably only really the difference between unlikely and never.  I.e. not worth £80.

I went with Durano Plus when I was on a road bike (different bike and route) as they were the only tyre that survived the glass. Conti 4 Seasons were my favourite, but I changed my route to use a few miles of a shared path, and the glass on it would cut them up and resulted in too many punctures.  The Durano's wore really well, and I had just one puncture in them over two years.

Main reason I was considering something slicker was that 2 chunks of the commute are highly optimised dashes to catch a train. The connectors are nobbly all over so feels wrong to leave them on if I'm only going off road once in a blue moon. Bicycle rolling resistance website has them at 31.4W vs e.g. 14.6W for a Conti GP4. That's a big % change but I don't really have a sense of how much I would feel that in reality. Obviously the driving factor in resistance on my bike is the pannier air brake but doesn't mean I can't optimise other things. 

Don't tend to encounter glass other than rare occasions so risk is minimal there. Currently erring towards trying a spesh roubaix or mondo

I've generally been a Schwalbe fan for city commuting, Marathon Supreme or Durano Plus (both tubed). Schwalbe have annoyingly discontinued both, I think Durano Plus have been replaced by One Plus but the Supreme successors are only available in 40mm and up. 

Gatorskins have plenty of haters due to poor wet grip, I am among them.

Posted by: Matthew Hornby

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Continental Contact in a tread pattern you prefer. Speed version is real fast, urban and Contact have more tread. 

Reliability is the key requirement for commuting tyres, especially if you have ”highly optimised dashes to catch a train". 

I think it depends on how long your commute is and what sort of terrain you cover. Info that seems to be missing from your post.

If your commute is 2 miles on a canal towpath, a mile across town to a station, or 25 miles of road in to a city then the answer will be different. 

My commute is 25 miles of road each way in to a city. I tried Marathon Plus tyres, they added about 10-15 mins extra time each direction each day, and removed any semblance of joy from the ride. 

Doing it twice a week for six months would about 24hrs of cycling time. You can fix a lot of punctures in 24hrs. 

I've replaced the Marathons with a series of Duranos, GP4000 and GP5000 and life is better.  

The Marathons are on now on the bike that gets used for the 1 mile commute across town to the station and going to the shops.

The last thing I wanted was a puncture while commuting, especially on way in.

I had good results from Marathon Cross, GP4Seasons, Marathon Supremes.

2.35" G One Speeds gave me several punctures before being ditched, Jumbo Jims a couple. 

I used to use 4Seasons for regular commuting, but now I prefer Continental Contact Urban in a larger size (38 I think) as they are so much better on the awful roads we have but still roll quite quick. I gave up on Marathons. It's not just that they were heavy, I found it very difficult to 'feel' how much grip they had.

I've had good luck with Vitoria rubino in terms of a price Vs durability vs puncture protection trade-offs. 

I never had issues with GP4000’s and subsequently GP5000’s

And i'll never touch another one! I used to get GP4000 through a sponsor, they used to disintegrate (threads coming off the sidewall) in weeks. So i stopped using them. Got some GP5000 on a new bike a couple of years ago, started shedding threads within the first half dozen rides...

Can confirm the Conti Contacts are fairly bombproof, at the expense of a little speed. If you want fit and forget, grippy riding at a reasonable price and aren't too fussed at how fast you get there, then can recommend.

Agreed. I've used them for years.

My commute is mostly gravel and 20 miles each way but some tarmac. I hate wearing tyres out so go for "gravel" tyres with a slick centre and what ever is in a sale and has a decent review. As I ride that bike more in a week than any other I like a nice feeling tyre. Tubeless every time. 

I’m on the 700x36c version of these slicks. 
They grip well enough, roll well enough and look very nice (well as nice as a black rubber torus can).

https://road.cc/content/review/wtb-exposure-tcs-fast-tyre-300005

I can’t recommend GP5000 S TRs - unlike the older TLs, they’re more prone to punctures and seem to wear much faster - 2000km vs 5000km.  I’m going to try the AS TRs next.  Slightly heavier, but hopefully closer to the TLs.