About SchoolBikeBus.com
Built by a bike bus parent
Hi, I’m Dennis. I’m a parent, a bike bus rider, and the person building SchoolBikeBus.com.
I didn’t start our bike bus. I joined one, at my son’s elementary school in Atlanta, and volunteered to help with its website. This site is the tool I kept wishing existed while we rode.
It started with my son
I grew up riding bikes, and I wanted my son to have that same feeling of independence. So when a few families at our school started a bike bus, we joined the second ride they ever organized.
01
A few texts, then bikes everywhere
The whole invitation was a few texts around the neighborhood. Then that morning, parents and kids kept showing up. Kids saw their friends. Parents met other parents. And instead of another ordinary trip to school, we all rode there together.
02
“BIKE BUS!”
One ride was all it took. The next Friday morning, my son came downstairs yelling it. He could not wait to go to school. That was the moment I knew there was something special here.
03
I volunteered to help
I am not our organizer. I am one of the parents who rides. But I work with websites, so I offered to help with ours, and that is when I saw everything behind the ride: the route explained one text at a time, names in spreadsheets, updates in group chats, new families hearing about it only from another family.
04
Then the question
I went looking for other bike buses and found them scattered across school websites, Instagram accounts, news articles and community pages. Some were easy to find. Some took real digging. Why isn’t there one simple place for all of this? So that is what I am building.
The goal is not to make bike buses complicated. It is to make the logistics disappear into the background.
So parents spend their energy on the ride instead of the spreadsheet.
What I am building
SchoolBikeBus exists so a bike bus is easier to find, join, start, and run. For a family, that means searching for their school and getting one clear answer: is there a bike bus here, where does it go, and how do we join.
For an organizer, it means one place for the route, the stops, the schedule, the roster and the Friday headcount, instead of all of it scattered across spreadsheets, emails and group chats.
The larger idea is even simpler: starting a bike bus should not require building a website first. If a few parents want to ride their kids to school together, the infrastructure should already be there. Put the route on a map, invite some families, pick a morning, and go. That is the hurdle this site exists to remove.
Where things stand
The directory is young and growing school by school and country by country, starting where organizers have told me they are already riding. If your school has a bike bus that is not listed, telling me about it is the fastest way to change that. If the information is wrong, help me fix it. If it does not have one, the organizer’s guide is written for the parent who might start one.
I am learning as I build this. The people who actually run and ride bike buses know far more about what they need than I do; my job is to listen and build something useful.
The Friday answer
One tap from every family each week. You know the headcount before you leave the house.
Most of it is free
$0
Finding a school, finding a bike bus, seeing the route, the stops and the times, and publishing those basics as an organizer. Free, and it stays free.
$100 a year
For organizers who want more: the map, photos, a link to wherever the group talks, and the roster and attendance tooling. One bike bus pays once. Families never need a subscription.
As little about children as possible
SchoolBikeBus is deliberately built to collect almost nothing about a child. A rider record holds a first name and a school year, which is what the person at the front of a bike bus needs in order to know who is with them.
Contact details a family gives an organizer, so a cancelled ride can be called, are shown to the people running that bike bus and to nobody else. They never reach a public page. I would rather build a useful tool than a database of information that never needed to exist.
The whole rider form
- First name
- School year
- Last nameno field exists
- Home addressno field exists
- Birthdateno field exists
- Medical notesno field exists
Bike buses are run by their communities
Every bike bus listed here is planned and operated independently by local parents and organizers. SchoolBikeBus does not create, inspect or certify routes, and a listing is not a statement that a route is safe. What gets published is what an organizer says, read by a person before it goes live. Families should look at the route, talk with the organizer, and make the call that is right for them.
How bike buses handle safety
The safety statement, what a route listing does and does not claim, and what to actually check before you ride.
A work in progress, and an open invitation
I am building this because bike buses are one of those wonderfully simple ideas that deserve to be easier to take part in, and I am learning as I go. If you organize a bike bus, ride in one, are trying to start one, or just have an idea for how this could work better, I genuinely want to hear it.