Run your bike bus without the spreadsheet.

Four things, every week: saying which mornings you are riding, knowing roughly how many are coming, turning up, and telling people when you are not riding. Everything else — the route, the stops, the times — you set once and change rarely.

Most bike buses do all four in a group chat, which works until about the fifth family. After that the answer to “how many on Friday?” is somewhere in four hundred messages, and the person who knows is the one person who cannot also be counting children at a corner.

From your page. A family finds it by searching their school, reads the route and the stop times, and either joins on the page or follows the link to your group chat — whichever you published.

Joining asks for a parent’s name, an email, an optional mobile number, which stop they board at, and each rider’s first name and grade. Nothing else: there is no field anywhere on this site for a child’s last name, birthday, address or medical information, and there never will be. You approve each family before they appear on the roster.

Joining on the page is a Pro feature. On the free plan your page still publishes the route, the stops and the times, and families reach you through the group chat or email link you added.

You publish the ride days and families answer for each one. Each rider has a usual answer — riding, or not — so most weeks nobody has to do anything and the count is already right; the answers that change are the ones people bother to change.

That gives you a headcount before the morning rather than a guess, which is the number that decides how many adults you need and whether the ride is worth running at all.

Weekly answers and the headcount are Pro.

Open the roster on your phone. It lists every rider expected, in stop order, with the family’s mobile number beside them — so when somebody has not arrived at a corner you can call the person standing at it rather than posting into a chat nobody is reading while cycling.

As you go you mark who actually rode. That is deliberately separate from who said they would: a family’s usual answer should not change because they overslept once, and a record of who rode is worth having when a school asks how many children this thing takes out of the car line.

The roster and attendance are Pro. Ride captains can see the roster and mark attendance; they cannot approve families or change the route.

Cancel the ride day and every family riding that morning is emailed, once, with the reason you gave. The subject line is readable on a lock screen without opening it, because the person who needs it is deciding whether to get the bikes out.

Un-cancelling sends nothing. Two emails twelve hours apart saying opposite things is worse than one email and a group chat message.

For the group chat half of it, there is a cancellation message you can paste. Free, no email required.

Yes, and there are three levels. The owner is you: one person, who can transfer the bike bus and cancel it. An organizer can do everything except that — routes, ride days, approvals, invitations, billing. A ride captain sees the roster and marks attendance, and nothing else.

A captain cannot make another captain. What a captain can see is children’s first names, grades and a parent’s mobile number, and a role that can grant itself has no ceiling — so captains nominate and an organizer confirms.

Co-organizers and captains are Pro. On the free plan a bike bus has one organizer, which is you. Either way, the printable role cards are free.

You hand the bike bus to somebody else and it keeps its page, its route, its families and its whole record. Transferring makes them the owner and makes you an organizer, so you do not lose access on the way out.

This is the part most bike buses lose. The route lives in one parent’s head and the roster lives in their phone, and when their youngest leaves the bike bus quietly stops. A page that outlives the founder is most of what this site is for.

Publishing is free forever: your page, as many routes as you need, every stop and every time, and a link to wherever your families already talk. That is the part a parent searching for your school needs, and it does not expire.

Pro is $100 a year for the whole bike bus — not per organizer, not per family — and adds the map, photos, and everything about managing families: joining on the page, approvals, the roster, weekly answers, attendance, co-organizers and export. Plenty of bike buses have a family who covers it, and plenty never need it.