Bike Buses
Description
Maxwell Adler:
“Call it a bike bus, a bike train, or a cycle bus. With safety, health and camaraderie in mind, people from Barcelona to Duluth, Georgia, have been gathering in large groups and riding to and from schools, creating a more protected route to school for some kids — and sometimes, a hard-to-miss, joyous spectacle that brings attention to the challenges and promise of biking to school.
“Bike buses create a safe environment for kids and they are a great way to raise visibility for cycling infrastructure,” said Dr. Jennifer Dill, director of the Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) at Portland State University.
The number of kids who walk or bike to school in the U.S. and elsewhere is just a fraction of what it was decades ago. With bike buses, the packs of cyclists are harder for cars to miss — and sometimes take up the full width of the road, leaving enough room for a few adults to shepherd larger groups of students safely. At Mason Elementary in Duluth, “bike trains” have one adult volunteer serving as the “engineer” in the front and another as the “caboose” in the back.
The phenomenon isn’t new. But as cycling took off during the pandemic, robust new bike bus initiatives have sprung up.
In Vic, a small Catalan city in the province of Barcelona, a bike bus project was started by two teachers, Helena Vilardell and Marga Pou, who were in search of a safer way for their students to bike to school. The route from their students’ homes to their school went down one of the busiest streets in the city, so for safety’s sake, the two teachers decided to accompany nine of the students on their trek. Less than two years after that first ride in March 2020, their bike bus has grown into a weekly affair, with more than 250 students making their way to nine different schools in the region every Friday. Vilardel, Pou and Eduard Folch went on to create a nonprofit organization called Canvis en Cadena in June 2021 that works with groups across Europe, the U.S. and even India, that are trying to start their own bike bus rides. “This could be a global movement,” said Folch. The Kid Safe SF bike bus was born out of a similar frustration with local cycling infrastructure.”