Cycling to school almost became extinct – until one man revived the bike bus | Cycling
“IIt’s a movement, not a moment. It is the mantra of Sam “Coach” Balto, a former school teacher from Portland, Oregon who left his job by day to stir up a revolution called “Bike Bus” – groups of children and families who cycle at school together.
How did a person in a medium American city transformed a weekly bike ride into something of a phenomenon? He relied on the power of social media. In the past two years, his videos have been seen by hundreds of millions of people.
School bikes should not be a big problem, but it has almost died in the United States after decades of helicopter parenting, automobile-oriented cities and the dangerous and toxic car traffic epidemic that accompanies them.
Like a scientist restaurant, a threatened species, Balto transformed his passion for the advantages of physical activity among young people into a trend that went from his current hometown to the northwest of the Pacific 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 that there are more than 200 bicycle buses across the United States.
They have existed for some time. In Portland, a “bicycle train” movement began in 2010 when a 24 -year -old bicycle defender named Kiel Johnson began to organize what he called “bicycle trains” in a primary school, where runners would join a mass of cyclists at various stops along a road to school. He made his way and in a few months that Johnson had signed six other schools, won a subsidy and had been interviewed by a national television program.
He also used Facebook to broadcast information and communicate with the other leaders on the bicycle train, but the video – apart from a download on YouTube in 2010 which barely reached 1,000 views in total – was not part of the image. “When you joined one of the big bicycle trains, it really felt like it is part of something – we just didn’t have any way to share this,” recalls Johnson now. “Social media did not have this capacity at the time.”
It would take a few years before sharing videos on Vine, Tiktok and X (then Twitter) would become current. The fact that Johnson found success without the boost of social media, however, showed the viral potential of the bicycle bus. It also turned out to be a challenge, because without the viral videos to reach and inspire millions in minutes, Johnson had to do a lot of this work itself. This lack of scalability was one of the reasons why he could not continue to advance trains by bicycle. In 2012, two years after their start, the bicycle train movement had reached the end of the line.
But big ideas have a way to stay alive. Almost a decade later, during a trip to Spain, a Californian called Zach Klein came across a large group of schoolchildren driving in the streets of Barcelona and took a video. “Something special takes place in Barcelona,” he posted on X on October 18, 2021. “They call it Bicibús-or Bike Bus.” Klein’s position became viral and was recovered four days later by national public radio, then spread online like a trail of powder. The one who saw it was Balto.
The following spring, Balto, then professor of physical education in a primary school, recalled that the video of Bicibús of Spain and decided to try one of his own. He developed a plan for a “bicycle bus for Earth Day” – a group ride that would meet about one mile from school and collect children and parents by bike along the way.
“I think it’s the start of something really special here,” said Balto at the start of the journey that morning. It turns out that it was a massive understatement. The children loved it, and why would they not do it? The advantages, after all, of the bike regularly are vast. It is good for the health of children – mental and physical – and also has an effect of training benefits for the whole family, as any Dutch person will say. Many Balto students say that the best thing about bicycle bus is that it is just a cool thing to do with friends.
But the excitement went far beyond school. Not only did the students asked with enthusiasm again the following week, but the videos became viral beyond all that Balto could have imagined. When he posted his first Béliaison clip for the Day Day on April 22, 2022, he was looked at more than 200,000 times. And it was only the beginning.
In September 2022, one of his bicycle bus videos had more than 1 million views on Tiktok. A week later, a parent published a bicycle bus video that had more than 2 million views overnight. Balto remembers watching his phone the next morning and shouting: “Damn shit! Fucking shit!” to himself. On the same day, he received emails from NBC, CBS, Access Hollywood and other media.
Over the next three years, Balto has gone from a bizarre activist on the original bicycle to a good faith celebrity. Last month, Justin Timberlake joined his bicycle bus after giving in to Proding by Balto and his legions of followers on Tiktok and Instagram. Timberlake was performing that night and appeared in advance to pedal alongside Balto and hundreds of children and fans. The video of this driving has 3.2 million views. In the past year only, Balto videos have been seen more than 200 million times.
Balto, who now directs the world of non -profit bicycle buses, attributes social media for the construction of the movement. “Without that, it could have been just a cool local initiative in Barcelona. But social media made him worldwide.
Balto is right that the moments are not movements, but as long as moments can be captured and shared on social networks, sometimes the movements follow.
