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The Rise of the “Bike Bus” Movement

01 On Earth Day* 2022, Sam Balto, a physical education teacher in Portland, convinced a few

02 dozen parents to send their kids to school on their bikes and posted the first in a series of videos

03 that turned his “bike bus” into a viral sensation. Balto has continued documenting his weekly

04 bike buses with joyous videos that show students rolling to school while he blasts music from an

05 eclectic collection of artists, including AC/DC, Metallica, and OneRepublic. Over time, these

06 boisterous bike buses have grown to more than 150 kids. “The more these kids practice riding

07 bikes, the more confident they become. And now they want to keep riding on non-bike bus days,

08 and even on rainy days!” said Balto.

09 Balto’s bike bus is much more than a fad. His TikTok and Twitter videos have raked in

10 millions of views, inspiring similar initiatives in New York, New Jersey, Florida, Utah, Ohio, and

11 Texas. Bike buses previously existed in European cities such as Barcelona and London, but new

12 ones in cities like Cape Town are now joining the trend. Nancy Pullen-Seufert, the director of the

13 National Center for Safe Routes to School, said biking and walking to school have myriad benefits,

14 including “improving air quality, improving safety for walkers and bicyclists, increasing physical

15 activity, and making it easier for school buses and others who can’t actively travel to school to

16 arrive to school on time.”

17 Balto has also triggered real political change by working with lawmakers to pass a so-called

18 “Bike Bus Bill”, that was signed into law by Oregon Governor Tina Kotek in August. “The bill

19 brings flexibility so school districts can now use student transportation funds, which were

20 previously only for school buses, to pay for crossing guards or adults to lead walking school buses

21 or bike buses. It’s awesome.” Balto said. And he is not the only bike bus leader driving positive

22 change in Oregon… Last year, Megan Ramey, who has been organizing a bike bus ___ 2020, was

23 named the Safe Routes to School Manager at Hood River County School District and since then,

24 she has secured nearly $11 million in funding to make it safer for kids to walk and bike to school.

25 “I feel like I'm in a cash-grabbing machine. We just got $7 million to create an off-road trail to

26 the high school. This means kids will be able to bike to high school on a green trail instead of a

27 car-centered road,” said Ramey.

28 Nearly 90% of kids walked to school in 1969. Half a century later, in 2017, that number

29 had fallen to just 10%. That year, a third of students took the school bus and more than half

30 were driven in a private vehicle. This has led to more pollution, with researchers finding that

31 toxic car fumes have an adverse effect on attention, reasoning, and academic performance

32 among school children. In New York, the Open Schools Program has helped increase biking and

33 walking in the 65 schools that restricted traffic during drop-off and pick-up times this year, said

34 Sabina Sethi Unni, who works at Open Plans, a non-profit that supports the shift to walkable

35 cities. “This program makes kids more comfortable with walking and biking at a young age. When

36 they get older, they will be cyclists instead of car users,” said Unni.

(Available in: https://www.distilled.earth/p/the-rise-of-the-bike-bus-movement – text especially adapted for this test).

*Earth Day: a day in April designated for promoting concern for the environment (Merriam-Webster).