There are three common, separate kinds of puncture that may afflict standard bicycle tyres (that is, those with inner tubes; tubeless tyres are rather different, and I have no experience of them).
- Probably the most common is the foreign-body puncture, in which a solid object penetrates the tyre from the outside, piercing the inner tube. I have three tips for dealing with these:
- Use tyres with a kevlar belt, or some other effective barrier between the tyre rubber and the inner tube. I use Schwalbe Marathons because they're the easiest to obtain for my wheel diameter; you may wish to shop around.
- Ensure your tyres are inflated to the recommended pressure. I prefer to use a pump with a built-in pressure gauge, for this. Don't over-inflate the tyres or you risk both blowing them and also increasing the shock your wheel experiences when it hits a bump in the road. Don't under-inflate either, or the tyres will pick up stones and glass shards like a sponge and you'll also increase your risk of pinch flats (see below).
- Use tyres with no more crenellation than is necessary for your riding conditions, as every nook in a tyre's tread can harbour a sharp that becomes worked deeper into the rubber during subsequent revolutions of the wheel.
- Pinch flats affect the sides of the inner tube, and are caused by the inner tube being pinched between the rim and the bead of the tyre. A well-inflated tyre seated in a rim of matching size, with an appropriately sized inner tube, should never suffer a pinch flat unless you're cornering fast enough to skid badly (in which case, you've got other worries).
- Spoke nipple wear can happen to an inner tube that is not sufficiently well isolated from spoke nipples. This isolation is normally achieved by rim tape, but rim tape can wear through. I've found cloth rim tape to work better than rubber rim tape. Velox rim tape is probably the most common, but there are other brands of cloth rim tape too. The most important thing is to make sure that your rim tape is fitted snugly. One the one hand, it mustn't be able to move from side to side - it must fill the well of the rim. On the other hand, it shouldn't extend too far up the sides of the rim, or it could fold up under the force from the inner tube, potentially pinching the inner tube in the fold.
I hope that this information will be as useful to someone else as it has been to me while I've been acquiring it over the last few years! If you want to learn more about bicycle wheels and their maintenance, you could hardly do better than to visit the website of the unique, incomparable, and now sadly deceased Sheldon Brown.