Cycling to school almost became extinct – until one man revived the bike bus

From TheGuardian.com

By Jonathan Maus

Sam Balto took the idea from a local school to the White House and beyond, inspiring a global movement in which children feel the benefits of cycling together.

t’s a movement, not a moment.” That’s the mantra from Sam “Coach” Balto, a former school teacher from Portland, Oregon who quit his day job to stoke a revolution called the “bike bus” – groups of kids and families cycling to school together.

How did one person in a mid-sized American city turn a weekly bike ride into something of a phenomenon? He leaned on the power of social media. In the past two years his videos have been viewed by hundreds of millions of people.

Riding bikes to school shouldn’t be a big deal, but it nearly became extinct in the US after decades of helicopter parenting, automobile-oriented cities and the epidemic of dangerous and toxic car traffic that accompanies them.

Like a scientist restoring a threatened species, Balto turned his passion for the benefits of physical activity in young people into a trend that has gone from his current home town in the Pacific north-west to the White House in Washington DC (where he was invited by former president Joe Biden to attend a holiday reception), and beyond. Today, Balto estimates there are more than 200 bike buses across the US.

They have been around for a while. In Portland, a “bike train” movement kicked off in 2010 when a 24-year-old bike advocate named Kiel Johnson began organising what he referred to as “bike trains” at an elementary school, where riders would join a mass of cyclists at various stops along a route to school. It caught on and in just a few months Johnson had signed up six other schools, won a grant, and had been interviewed by a national television show.