Last updated on July 1, 2026
Continental TravelContact 26 x 1.75″ TireToday after work I picked up two Continental TravelContact tires for my bike. While the tires that it came with are pretty decent, I wanted a smoother rolling tire for when riding on paths and other paved areas. While I’d previous purchased some rather all right Forte FastCity ST/K mostly smooth tires, I found that they are just too narrow for anything other than pavement.
After a bunch of reading online and a bit of conversation here, I ended up going by REI and purchasing a membership, two tires, and two tubes. I wasn’t sure if the tubes already in my bike tires would fit, so I got these. I’ve got a spare 1.5″ – 2.0″ Forte tube, so that’ll continue to be my spare (these are 1.75″).
As you can see above (or in this top view), the Continental TravelContact has a really smooth center, with knobs on the edges. I took the bike out for a quick ride this evening after fitting the tires, and they definitely roll both more smoothly and easily than the knobby tires which were on there. I had no problem riding / hopping over some of the remaining piles of snow either, and they feel a good bit more solid / sure footed than the narrow FastCity ST/K ones I’d tried before. So, all in all, these seem like pretty nice tires. Hopefully I’ll have some time to ride this weekend and get a good bit more use out of them.
Oh, I also swung by Lowes on the way home and picked up this cheap lock ($12) for securing my bike when running up to the grocery store. It’s the sort of area where one could leave their car doors unlocked and most likely not have a problem, so I think this should be good enough for keeping someone from just riding away. I wouldn’t trust it for all-day use in a secluded area, but for a bike rack near the front door of a large grocery store, it should be fine.
UPDATE: I just remembered that I forgot to roll out the front tire and measure it’s circumference. Ergh. I’ll have to do this tomorrow. If I’m going to instrument something (in this case, the bike) I like it to be reasonably accurate.
So does this mean that the grocery store came through with their promise to install bike racks? If so, that is awesome!
That’s exactly what happened. I had actually received email over the weekend apologizing for it not being installed (yet), promising that it’d get installed soon. Sunday I drove past the store en route to Kate and Ben’s and saw the rack there. I’ll be using it when I have to pick up groceries this week.
I’m hoping to grab a photo of the rack and make a post about it.
You’ve just reminded me. My bike’s tyres look like yours, but only because I’ve totally worn the tread off them.
GPSBabel looks interesting. I’ve got a yellow Garmin eTrex that sits unused in my house. Might be useful now I have a way to process the tracks it makes.
Hah, yeah… You might want to replace them. ;) New tyres aren’t that expensive, really. They are pretty easy to put on, too. The hardest part for me is cleaning the wheels so my hands don’t get too dirty, cleaning the brakes, then re-tweaking things.
Those look nice. They’ll be safer too; knobbies on pavement tend to squirm and you don’t have as good control.
That lock is probably all you’ll ever need. Honestly, I bought a $4 cheapo Meijer combo lock. Around here I just want something to keep kids from dicking with my bike. And at that, I never use it. In fact I don’t even carry it anymore. If I went into Ann Arbor I probably would, but in Chelsea, well, I was walking around town last fall, and I counted 12 bikes unattended, 5 were kids bikes at the library, and none of them were locked up, and nobody has any trouble.
I also have a heavier Nashbar combo lock. I carried it for a while until I realized I didn’t need a lock at all. It has two advantages: I can set the combo for it, and I don’t think you could break it with a screwdriver; the $4 one I think you could. Once a year the company I work for has a breakfast meeting in Livonia; I carry the lock to that but so far I’ve just pulled the bike inside and parked it in the coat room. There’s nothing to lock to outside anyway.
I measured my roll-out, but then I also put the GPS on my bike and found about a 1% error on my commute (1000 feet on the 20 mile round trip) and tweaked the circumference a few millimeters to fix it. I figured the GPS was probably more accurate, especially considering that the bike was unloaded (and the tires unsquished) during the rollout measurement (plus no cornering, etc).
Thanks. :) I’m pretty happy with them. They also don’t look odd on a mountain bike like the FastCity ST/K ones do.
The area I live in (Shelby Township) I think one more has to worry about someone just grabbing the bike and throwing it in the back of a pickup, but not actual breaking locks theft. It’s still a bit larger than I’d like lock-wise, but as long as it fits in the grocery basket it’s okay.
I’d like to find a better way to find out for sure if a roll-out or GPS is more accurate, or what is a good middle. For reference, if you take a look at this map (KMZ) and zoom a ways in, you can see that the GPS logging appears to be in one or two second increments. In places where I was moving at a reasonable pace and the sampling didn’t occur right at the turn, corners are rounded off, shortening the distance (example).
That all said, the squished tire problem and such is going to (obviously) make a rollout inaccurate as well.
Maybe the best thing to do would be to find a paved (non-rubbery) 1/4 mile track, like at a school or something, and take 20 or so laps, then calculate things from there?
Well, the best thing to do would be to pick a nice straight road, ride 10 miles out and 10 back, with the GPS running. If you give it a minute at the turn around point, you should be accurate to within 15 feet or so.
Laps are going to vary widely unless you can stay exactly on the lane line and you know the distance for that lane.
Oh, yeah. That’s true… I could probably do that along Metro Parkway. It’s pretty straight west of Gratiot, and very accessible.
Of course, that’d need to be done with each set of tires, and doesn’t take tire wear into account…
Maybe I’m just getting a bit too picky.