The Power of the Bike Bus
This article was originally published, in slightly different form, on Strong Towns member Will Gardner’s Substack, StrongHaven. It is shared here with permission.
I don’t know a lot of parents who would name school drop-off and pickup as the high point of their week. But for me, every Friday, it is! That’s because I get to roll to school with a crew of riders that’s now up to 50 students and growing. With accompanying adults, we ride over 60 people deep in Fairhaven, Massachusetts.
The Bike Bus has nearly doubled since we started last spring. Most of our growth comes through word of mouth: kids are telling other kids how fun it is. Also, the bigger our group gets, the more families notice us and want to join. It’s pretty exciting to see it catch on.
The recent leap in attendance means more challenging logistics. Thankfully, we have an awesome group of parent volunteers. Jon holds down most days as Sweeper, making sure no one falls behind, while Aaron, Nurse Amy, Chuck, and Ana serve as “corkers,” watching and blocking intersections as needed and supporting any riders who need help along the ride. Officer Haaland very generously provides us with a police escort.
Enjoying the Ride
Part of the fun is the reaction we get from the people we see along the ride: lots of smiles from people along the bike path. Lots of horns and thumbs up from drivers on their morning commute. It’s hard to not be filled with joy by the sight of 50 kids on bikes.
Wood School Bike Bus Founding Father Mat Coes famously said that Bike Bus is a ride, not a race. That’s a useful frame of mind to keep the ride safe and enjoyable. It’s also an important reminder to me to enjoy the Bike Bus in its current state, even as I continue to dream big for what it could become. Last spring, I threw out an ambitious goal of getting 100 kids to walk and bike to school regularly. If every day was Friday, we’d be halfway there (but would Friday still be Friday?).
Further Down the Road
At its current size, the Bike Bus gives us a sense of what 100 regular riders might be like. The number of riders we currently have is enough for the ride to feel pretty safe, even with the some of the lackluster biking infrastructure in our town. A crowd of bikes is hard to miss. Cars all slow down to at or below the posted speed limit of 20 mph for the school zone—something they never do if it’s just me and my kid biking on our own down that stretch. In addition to being safer, having more riders increases the fun factor for kids. The more of your friends who are riding, the more you want to ride with them, arriving as a crew.
A bigger Bike Bus also highlights the real challenges riders and walkers face when they try to get around our town. We call out “turbulence” before each crack in the bike path to warn the riders behind us about the bumps ahead. The Board of Public Works will be addressing this issue soon with an overlay of the asphalt. Even so, the scope of this work doesn’t allow them to widen the narrow path, meaning it will still fall short of the standard of allowing two people to bike side by side without taking up part of the oncoming lane. More distressingly, bike and pedestrian infrastructure along Sconticut Neck Road is still largely nonexistent. A grant written by the aforementioned Mat and shepherded by Board of Public Works Director Vinnie Furtado secured funding for an overhaul of a key section of this road. This work, nearly a decade in the making, will include moving utility poles so that they’re not in the middle of the sidewalk and creating a multi-use trail that extends from the bike path to the school. The infrastructure improvement will no doubt encourage a lot more riding and walking to school here.
A bigger Bike Bus also means that when we arrive at school, we now take up more space. The current process for school drop-off gives all of the space (save a sidewalk that can only be accessed by crossing a car lane) to cars. At 8:40 a.m., the moment the doors close and students are marked tardy, the car line often stretches the length of the school and back to the road. Given that the front of the school is given over to car drop-off, bike riders have to get off their bikes at the start of the school property and walk the rest of the way to the school building. It’s a minor inconvenience. At the same time, I look forward to a time when we can prioritize more space for parents and kids who walk and ride to school. Creating more space for bikers and walkers encourages more biking and walking. This in turn frees up more space for everything. Here’s an image familiar to active transportation folks:
The space taken up by 60 people with and without cars.
I’d estimate that of the 50 students who ride on the Bike Bus, at least 20 are in personal cars on other days. Twenty cars put end to end take up about 300 feet, which is the same as the distance from the road to the entrance to the school.
On Bike Bus days, we make one chunk of this traffic disappear! In a future of over 100 walkers and riders, the car line would probably not be as long or as slow. Kids might also get the bonus health benefit of having fewer tailpipes releasing harmful particulates toward their faces. While there may be some disagreement about whether kids on bikes should take priority elsewhere in town, it’s hard to argue with the idea of setting aside more space for kids at an elementary school. Adjusting our infrastructure and shifting our habits to increase active transportation makes more room for all of us.
Will Gardner is an education consultant and the founder of Alma del Mar Charter Schools. He’s currently scheming about how to improve his town, but he’s happy to help you with whatever you’re working on. You can find him at StrongHaven.substack.com.
