I Started a Bike Bus, and You Can Too

If you’re the parent of an elementary-school-aged kid, you’ve probably heard of a bike bus. It carries a group of children to school in the same way a regular school bus does, except everyone is on bikes. The “bus driver”—an adult on a bike—guides a slowly moving group ride along a predefined route. Kids and their parents join the group on their own bikes when the pack rolls by.

Bike buses are a way for everyone to bike together for fun, convenience, and safety; on busy, traffic-congested commuter streets, a big group of five to 10 kids is much more visible than one or two kids biking alone. The idea has caught on recently, as kids of all ages have slowly returned to in-person schooling in cities that have adapted to make their streets more welcome to cyclists. 

Sam Balto is a physical education teacher at Alameda Elementary school in northeast Portland, Oregon, and on Wednesdays he leads a bike bus to school. Balto’s bus is especially visible, as it consists of hundreds of whooping, shouting kids and parents and stretches out over several blocks.

Balto vlogs his bike bus trip on TikTok, and I can’t watch his videos without crying. As the parent of a 5- and 7-year-old, the bike bus is an antidote to the fear and loneliness I’ve experienced over the past few years, wondering if my kids would get the crippling inflammatory Covid complication or watching my kindergartener struggle with remote schooling. Laughing kids! Outside, in person! Together! So when a friend texted and asked if I would lead a bike bus in our neighborhood, of course I said yes.

Wheels tricked out with lights are safer, and cooler.

My transition to full-on Bike Mom happened quickly. One day, I was just an ordinary parent, buckling my kids into their car seats. Then I started testing electric bikes. A few short years later, here I am, clipping bike lights onto one kid's bike and zipping the other into a tent on the back of my long-tail cargo bicycle, dinging the bike bell at passersby waving as we go to school.

Replacing the car with a cargo bike changed all of our lives, for the better. As the US Department of Transportation notes on its website, using active transportation to commute to work and school—whether that’s a biking bus, or even a walking bus—has many holistic benefits. Yes, people are healthier and happier when they’re more active, but reducing the number of cars around a school can also reduce traffic congestion and carbon emissions.

Multimodal transportation is also an equity issue. The US is an exceptionally dangerous place to be a pedestrian, and low-income people of color are far more likely to be killed by motor vehicles than white citizens of other income brackets. One surefire way of reversing this trend is to improve the pedestrian and cycling infrastructure in our cities, which saves lives by better protecting the more vulnerable road users from speeding traffic. Walking and biking buses are also effective ways to reduce student absences, since many parents work outside of school hours and have difficulty driving their kids to and from school.