Climb on the magic bike bus
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DENVER — Carpool looks a little different this year at some of Denver’s elementary schools. Instead of parents dropping off their kids by car, they’ve been doing it by bike.
It’s called a bike bus.
On a brisk, sunny spring morning in Denver’s Park Hill neighborhood, Rocky Mountain PBS joined Park Hill Elementary School’s bike buses. About 70 kids clad in bright helmets and spunky backpacks sojourned together — with parental supervision — on a 1 mile-long bike route to school, picking up kids and parents along the way.
“Last week, I got teary eyed because there was a girl who rode for the first time, and she said during the ride, ‘this is so much fun,’” said Liz Brodahl, leader of the Park Hill bike bus. “I think that's really what it's all about.”
National bike-to-school day happens twice a year, but bike buses occur regularly from twice a week to biweekly depending on the bike bus. Unlike traditional school buses operated by the district, these pupil pelotons are run almost entirely by parents.
Parents say the bike bus is an act of resistance against cars, as a way to keep kids healthy and energized for school, and as a way to build community — all while teaching kids how to bike safely and responsibly.
There’s at least five schools in Denver that have launched bike buses in the last two years. The latest one started this May at Cheltenham Elementary School in Sloan’s Lake. The routes range from half a mile to three miles.
“It’s an organized set route on a set timetable with the idea of it being similar to a bus in that kids can get on the bus at different stops along the route,” said Melissa Colonno, leader of a weekly bike bus at Odyssey School of Denver, a charter school.
In each bike bus, helmets are required. One parent takes the lead and one parent takes the caboose. Participants wait until everyone catches up to cross busy intersections.
“I feel really safe because there’s a lot of parents and they’re not just going to watch out for their own children. They’re going to watch out for you also,” said Callum Kass, a second grader at Park Hill Elementary School.
The day Rocky Mountain PBS joined the Park Hill Elementary School bike bus, a few kids roller bladed alongside the bikers, 80’s music blasted from Brodahl’s speakers and kids called out to their friends and waved hello each time a new person joined the bus.
“It’s like a roving party of kindergartners,” said Allen Cowgill, a leader of a bike bus across town at Brown International Academy. “It’s just a blast.”
Every adult bike bus leader Rocky Mountain PBS spoke to mentioned Sam Balto, an almost godlike figure in the bike bus world. Balto is a PE teacher in Portland, Oregon, known for popularizing the movement in the United States in 2022. He was inspired by Barcelona’s “Bici Bus.”
This January, Balto’s bike bus went viral when Justin Timberlake joined the group. Balto had played a Timberlake track on his bike bus last October and invited Timberlake to join in the fun via social media.
Balto now runs an organization called Bike Bus World, where bike bus leaders from around the world can communicate with each other, share advice and engage in advocacy.
Allen Cowgill, the bike bus leader at Brown International Academy in Sloan’s Lake, said he’s reached out to members of the community for advice on music to play and safety best practices.
This May, for national bike-and-roll-to-school day, Cowgill took his bike bus a step further and worked with Denver Public Schools to close the street in front of the school to traffic.
“It sounds like it was a real battle with the city [Denver] just to close the street for, like, two hours in a day,” said Colonno. “I think that speaks a lot to our city's culture and the political view of this kind of thing.”
While most bike buses are organized by parents of students attending the school, Cowgill’s at Brown International also has help from the surrounding community. He’s amassed a formidable hodgepodge of volunteers to support his biweekly bike bus, including a retired educator, a biking advocate, a marketing professional and a state traffic engineer. Some of the volunteers monitor intersections. Others wave drivers down to make sure they see the kids in the street and others hold crossing guard signs.
“I feel so lucky to have so many amazing community members that help us out,” Cowgill said. “We’re very fortunate.”
Biking to school isn’t new, but it has lost considerable momentum over the decades.
In 1969, 42 percent of schoolchildren walked or biked to school. These days, only about 10 percent do, according to the Federal Highway Administration. More than half of kids travel to school by car.
“I was one of those kids that grew up in the ‘80s. I biked and walked to school, and my parents didn't go with me,” said Cowgill. “I wanted to give my kids and all kids in our neighborhood a similar opportunity.”
Most of the bike buses occur in neighborhood public schools, meaning students and their families live nearby. But Colonno leads a bike bus at Odyssey School of Denver, a charter school whose families are more spread out across the city.
“There’s just never going to be huge numbers [of participants],” she said. “But I still feel like it’s worth it to even just have an impact on a few families or a few kids.”
She said her weekly Friday bike bus ranges from 10 participants to 30.
While the bike bus movement has been popular — and growing in some of Denver’s schools — it hasn’t been accessible across the board.
“They get started in wealthier neighborhoods because the parents in those neighborhoods have the capacity, resources and time on their hands to do all of the organizing to get something like this up and running,” said Jill Locantore, executive director of Denver Streets Partnership, an organization that advocates for designing streets for people over cars.
“In the low-income communities a lot of parents, some single parents working multiple jobs, don’t have the time to organize something like this,” she said. “I think until there is more public funding available to support it, it will be limited, unfortunately, to higher income, wealthier neighborhoods.”
Kris Rollerson, executive director of Sun Valley Youth Center, set out to change that. Sun Valley is a neighborhood with one of the highest rates of poverty in Denver. It’s flanked by heavy industry, highways and train tracks.
This May for national bike-to-school day, Rollerson launched the neighborhood’s first bike bus, and lent all the participating kids bikes and helmets. (The youth center was already equipped with hundreds of bikes.)
Rocky Mountain PBS visited the bike bus as the students prepared to head home. Twenty-two elementary students, all of color, joyfully gathered around their bikes, suited up in neon safety vests and helmets — and headed back to Sun Valley.
“We’re just trying to do something positive and get the kids excited about going to school,” Rollerson said. “There’s a lot of science that says [exercise] helps kids regulate their minds and sets their day up for success.”
The students Rollerson organized lost their zoned school, Fairview Elementary School, in 2023 due to declining enrollment, so the kids living in Sun Valley now have to trek further to Cheltenham Elementary School.
Some of the kids who miss the bus in the morning end up skipping school for the day, she said, because most of the parents are working and there’s no safe route to school. To get to school, the kids must cross Federal Boulevard or Colfax Avenue, two major, heavily-trafficked thoroughfares.
Rollerson hopes her bike bus will teach kids how to bike confidently in case they ever miss the bus.
Rollerson said she plans to hold the bike bus monthly when the new school year begins this fall. “I’d love to do it every week,” she said, but the time and effort it takes to put on the bike bus — and recruit volunteers — makes once-a-month more realistic.
Earlier this year, Portland, Oregon, earned a $1.1 million federal grant to support walking, school bus and bike bus programs around its metro area in an effort to study the impact when these activities are funded and supported by more than just a handful of parents.
Locantore thinks it’s a great idea. “Why are we publicly subsidizing one form of kids getting to school [school buses] and not the other?” she said. “Denver Public Schools pays for the yellow school buses. They could pay for the supports that are required to organize a bike bus.”
Tom Wildman, a parent who runs the Steck Elementary School bike bus, agreed it takes time and effort to organize a bike bus.
“I was really worried thinking about ‘I'm kind of responsible for people's safety here,’” he said. “You’ve got to plan from scratch and have really safe meeting points.”
He said in April his school launched a second bike bus due to demand from a different starting point, “but it was a huge struggle to find anyone to lead it.”
The other challenge, besides organizing a bike bus, is ensuring students are safe.
“A lot of challenges for schools in Denver is that they’re located on a high injury network street,” said Locantore.
High injury network streets are corridors where a disproportionately high number of traffic crashes result in serious injuries or fatalities.
“The school itself might be on a nice, quiet neighborhood street, but they have to cross, say, Federal Boulevard to get there,” she said. “That’s the weak point that makes it unsafe.”
In March, a driver hit and killed a 15-year-old boy who was riding a scooter to school near Federal Boulevard and 52nd avenue in Denver’s Regis neighborhood. A year before that, another 13-year-old boy was killed while riding his skateboard to school on a busy six-lane intersection in Highlands Ranch.
In 2024, 110 pedestrians and 14 bicyclists were killed in traffic crashes in Colorado, most occurring in the Denver metro area, according to the Colorado Department of Transportation.
Both Wildman and Cowgill said the most dangerous sections of the bike route are around the school.
“It’s everyone doing school drop off,” said Wildman.
Bike bus leaders and advocates say there’s safety in numbers and they do everything they can to make the route safe. All five bike bus leaders Rocky Mountain PBS spoke to said they haven’t had any incidents with cars.
“We’re wearing bright yellow,” said Brodahl. “We have parents do what we call a ‘cork the street.’” Corking involves one or two parents blocking cross-traffic at an intersection until all the riders have passed through.
“Even in communities that don't have safe infrastructure, it's a way to create that safety just through having a critical mass of people on the street,” said Locantore.
Locantore believes the city should be doing more to build safer infrastructure around schools, but money and politics remain the biggest roadblocks.
“The amount of funding needed to implement these types of street design changes across the entire city far outstrips what we currently have in the city's annual budget,” she said. “And the politics of this requires changing the way our streets function and that often means deprioritizing driving. There’s inevitably pushback to that kind of change.”
The city of Denver currently has 480 miles of on-street and off-street bike trails, and plans to build another 400 miles of new bikeways by 2050. Their goal is to build the network out so that all residents live within a quarter mile of a bikeway.
Ken Burdette, principal of Park Hill Elementary School, has noticed a difference in his school’s culture since the bike bus launched this past October.
“We’ve seen students being on time a little bit more and less tardiness,” he said. “Kids are arriving happy, motivated and energized for the school day.”
Vivienne Taylor, a fourth grader at Park Hill Elementary, said biking to school helped her get in the zone for standardized testing this year.
“It just felt good to let some of my energy out before sitting through 90 minutes of staring at a computer,” she said.
Due to the popularity of the two bike buses, the school’s bike racks have reached maximum capacity.
With all the momentum and enthusiasm, Denver’s bike buses won’t be pumping the brakes any time soon.
“It’s fun. That's what keeps it going,” said Cowgill.
Type of story: News
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
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