A bike bus is a school run with a playlist

Celebrating all of our amazing fathers this Father's Day, with love from all of us at Earth to Sea News.

A bike bus works exactly like the other kind. It has a route and a timetable, it stops at corners where more riders join, and it gets everyone to school by the bell. Only the passengers are pedalling. Families in Barcelona were riding to school in a long, cheerful convoy they called the bicibús before the idea crossed the Atlantic, and on Earth Day 2022 a Portland physical education teacher named Sam Balto led his students to school with a speaker on his handlebars, filmed it, and watched the video travel around the world. Portland now has around thirty bike buses running on its quiet neighbourhood greenways, Balto's charity Bike Bus World helps communities anywhere start their own, and the idea has turned up in New York, Florida, Bogotá, Belgium and Cape Town. In April this year organisers, teachers and city officials from around the world met in Lisbon for the first international Bike Bus Summit. This August, as terms began in Chicago, families were leaving the car at home and joining new routes, and Portland's transport bureau is spending five hundred thousand dollars over two years on safer crossings and calmer streets along the routes the buses already use.

What the kids get out of it is the point. Balto says the more they ride, the more confident they become, and they start wanting to ride on the days there is no bus. Children who walk or ride arrive at school more awake, gain a sense of independence and keep the habit as they grow, and a street full of bikes at bell time is a street with far fewer idling engines outside the school gate. Starting one is simple. Pick a route on quiet streets, set a start time and a couple of pick up corners, find a few adults to ride at the front, the middle and the back, roughly one grown up for every four children, and put the word out. Bring music. Spring is arriving in our half of the world, the mornings are getting lighter, and a bike bus needs nothing more than that and a handful of neighbours who want to try.