how many miles should I get from bike tires?

Answer 1

I guess that will depend on the type of bike tires and the conditions that you ride in.

Instead of simply relying on a blanket rule from people that don't know much about your gear and riding conditions, consider inspecting your tires on a regular basis and checking for tire wear. In general, make sure your tire still has tread (or isn't flattened out if you are riding treadless road bike tires), doesn't have lots of slashes/holes in it from glass and other stuff getting in the tires. And if you see glass and other stuff stuck in the tire, be sure to deflate your tires and pick them out since eventually, they will work their way in further and cause a flat.

Also, your rear tire will wear faster than your front tire. However, never swap tires to even out the wear -- you always want you "best" tire on the front since getting a flat on your front tire can cause a serious crash (compared to getting a flat in the rear which is just annoying). Always replace both front and rear tires at the same time...if the front tire looks decent, save it for an emergency spare or for use on your trainer.

I typically get about 2000 miles from my road bike tires (Continental GP3000's). After that, I know it's time to replace the tires since I start getting flats quite frequently.

Answer 2

1000 miles from racing tires, 15,000 miles for road tread beach cruiser tires.

The differences are:
The small, lightweight tire with no tread will also have a more fragile rubber compound, and a lot less of it.

The large tire may employ a modest tread without reducing speed, and this allows to use a harder rubber compound, yet faster without loss of wet weather handling.

Why doesn't everybody run a large street tire, such as Schwinn Typoon Cord that surpasses the speed of a racing tire on flat ground, while covering a wider variety of surfaces and being much more flat resistant?

Flat ground is not where the challenge is to a racing bike.

However, beach cruiser tires at 980 grams are far slower on hills than 200 gram racing tires.

Weight, and that's mostly rubber thickness, needs to be multipled by pi because it is rotating weight.

Difference of 980 and 200 is 780.
780 x 3.14 = 2449 grams
There are two tires and thus two such differences
2449 x 2 = 4898 grams
The tubes are heavier.

Let's just call it at 2 1/2 pounds.

We'll skip the rest of the math, but this is not 2.5 pounds of static weight. This is gyroscopic weight, and as such, resists change.

So, not only is it heavier on a hill climb, it is highly resistant to speeding up. Imagine slinging a 2.5 pound weight around in your house (at 26 to 44 miles per hour).
That's a mighty strong gyroscopic effect, which also prefers to remain in a single direction, thus making for imprecise and very wide steering.
For the math folks who are now alarmed, yes, I did mean to say that the effect is a higher progression than pure geometric.

So, the amount of miles you should get from bike tires is highly application specific.

But, if you need to sprint or race up hills, the figure is very small.

See roadbikereview.com and mtbr.com for specific reviews of application specific tires and their various performances, including the best answer you can get on how many miles you can expect the tires to last.

EDIT: There are some different results from the past, now considered "in antiquity" where harder rubber compound racing tires were installed on cheaper bikes to give them remarkable speeds at the cost of very frequent crashes--but it sold one heck of a lot of bikes, at the additional cost of a sudden rush towards giving up on road cycling. Even farther in the past were 3-speed bikes with a safer, wider, treaded, hard compound tire that did not crash.
This long-lasting technology is not generally available today because it will not stop in wet weather and it can slide on corners.
An exception is Tioga's mountain bike slick, which is fast, last long, and crashes often. ;)
Another exception is Schwinn's Typhoon Cord that is big enough and treaded enough that there are no safey concerns while the hard rubber goes terribly fast.
A similar, but softer, mountain bike design is Kenda Kross Plus Yellow Label, where it is hard down the middle (very thick) and has some side lugs that actually work well on gravel.
In racing, where stopping is not the point, hard-down-the-middle, sticky-on-the-sides tires are available, last longer, and work well.

However, the majority of todays tires are completely covered in sticky rubber that does not last. Here's an interesting example from Panaracer that applies to the majority of today's bike tires, including racing tires, and it includes the reason that mid-size MTB slicks do not work.
The slow Panaracer T-Serv, at 26x1.75 has the same rubber compound as the very fast T-Serv 700c x 25mm. This is totally inappropriate, because the 26" tire is not optimized with a different rubber compound even though the contact is wider--just like the vast majority of today's tires.

That's right, tire manufacturers rarely change the rubber compound to accomodate different tire sizes. For cost cutting, wear, and performance issues, the small tire in a "family of tires" is the only one optimized. The rest go slower, but do not last longer.

Previously, we could buy a larger tire, expecting it to last much longer. This is no longer true--unless the tire comes in only one size.

Answer 3

2 miles

Answer 4

I been riding my bike to and from work for years. My answer is 2800 miles.