Sam Balto Has Made Portland’s Bike Buses Famous. Can They Last?

The world’s most famous bike bus is about to roll out. At 7:30 on a crisp November morning, about 60 children—in shark helmets, in strawberry helmets, in doughnut helmets—and a smattering of parents are packed together on Northeast Klickitat Street on their way to Alameda Elementary School.

At the front of the ride, astride an Urban Arrow electric bike and wearing a yellow safety jacket, is Sam Balto. Known as @CoachBalto to his hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, the 40-year-old father of two started the Alameda bike bus on Earth Day 2022 when he was the school’s physical education teacher. The bike bus winds through the Beaumont-Wilshire neighborhood picking up students every Wednesday morning, rain or shine. Today, he leads the students in a chant.

He begins: “When I say bike, you say bus. Bike!”

“Bus!” shout the children.

“Bike!”

“Bus!”

He continues. “Alright, everybody, awesome to see you all. Remember: straight line biking. Give everybody space, respect everybody’s bubbles. We’ve been doing a great job of that all year. There are leaves. Please don’t ride through the leaf piles, as tempting as it is. If you’re ready say, ‘We ready.’”

The kids, they ready.

Balto hits play on a remix of the Bruno Mars and Rosé hit “APT.” and the bike bus zooms toward school, winding past million-dollar-plus, 1920s English Tudor mansions in one of the most picturesque neighborhoods in the city, kids whooping as they turn down the steep Alameda Ridge on the final descent.

They are, perhaps, pedaling Portland back into the pole position of cycling cities. That is, if Coach Balto can keep the energy up.

There is no actual bus on a bike bus. It’s just a mass of children, with at least one adult leader, riding bikes to school together on a designated route at a designated time. It’s safety in numbers: These pint-sized cyclists are more visible in a group, and a lot less likely to get lost on the way to school. The Alameda bike bus route is about a mile and a half long, or three pop songs, depending on a child’s starting point.

Such an operation requires many hands. There are about a half dozen unpaid volunteers on the bike bus: “corkers” to help stop traffic, “sweeps” to make sure no child is left behind, a middle schooler who wears one of Balto’s speakers as a backpack for him as he rides. Balto claps for the children as they bike the final block, and tells them to “rock the day.”

The bike bus concept is gaining in popularity, and Portland is now home to about 25 bike buses. This is largely thanks to Balto, who officially gave notice to Portland Public Schools in the spring that he would not be returning as a PE teacher because his bike bus duties are now a full-time job. As co-founder and executive director of a new nonprofit organization called Bike Bus World, Balto traveled to 13 different bike buses around the world to ride and advocate for active transportation and safe routes to school last year: Vienna; Cardiff, Wales; Miami; and Washington, D.C.

But the most famous bike bus in the world is this one, in Alameda, in part because it has famous friends. In January, Justin Timberlake joined the Alameda bike bus as a special guest, resulting in 3.7 million views on TikTok and a shout-out from the Moda Center stage at Timberlake’s concert that night. Adam Met—the “A” of the pop trio AJR—rode along in April 2024.

Balto also snagged Benson Boone in October to sing along with the kids to his hit song “Beautiful Things” on Vernon K–8’s bike bus. The coach is media savvy enough to know that adorable children riding through a gorgeous neighborhood to a pop music soundtrack is feel-good TikTok bait at its finest. Add a celebrity? Irresistible.

This Wednesday morning ride hosts three journalists. (“There’s always someone different,” says second grader Eden, who says giving media interviews is one of his favorite parts of biking to school. He’s done seven.) The production quality is there, too, with two heavy-duty speakers and a 360-degree camera attached to Balto’s handlebars for the reel he’ll post later.

Two of the ride’s guests dismount their e-bikes and reflect on the scene at Alameda. Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon are the hosts of the podcast The War on Cars and are in Portland promoting their new book, Life After Cars. Portland is considered the epicenter of the bike bus movement, they say, and it’s because of Balto and his nonprofit Bike Bus World.

“He is relentless in his focus of bringing attention to the bike bus,” Gordon says. “He’s successfully done something in a short amount of time that sometimes takes people a decade or more to do.”

Portland spent decades building up our bike culture, starting with Gov. Tom McCall’s visionary 1971 Oregon Bicycle Bill that required 1% of all state highway funds to go toward cyclists and pedestrians. Today, we’ve got a 462-mile bikeway network, a Biketown bike share program, annual Pedalpalooza programming, and not one but two World Naked Bike Rides.

Yet Portland has not been the darling of the country’s cycling culture in more than a decade. Bicycle use steadily increased from the early 1990s on, peaking in 2014 when Portland set a national record for bicycle commuting in a large city with 7.2% of people biking to work, according to the Portland Bureau of Transportation. Then it began a steady decline; the number is now 3.7%.

The advocacy organization PeopleForBikes puts out annual city ratings that measure the quality of biking all over the world. Portland is seventh among large U.S. cities in 2025, behind Brooklyn and Queens, N.Y.; Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn.; Seattle; and San Francisco.

The bike bus has renewed attention on Portland for cycling innovation. It did not originate at any level of government, however, but with a charismatic PE teacher on a mission.

Which means that the phenomenon, while exciting, is about as stable as a 6-year-old on a Schwinn.

Bike buses can be tough to get rolling for a variety of reasons—lack of infrastructure, language barriers, a shortage of bikes—and they are impossible to sustain forever on the backs of volunteers alone. Balto is finally getting paid for his work, but he’s one of very few.

“Portland is very much on the forefront of pushing the bike bus agenda and showing what’s possible. We’re the city with the most bike buses per capita, and we’re very organized,” he says. “But we’re all parents. There’s a limit to our capacity.”

As a parent, there’s something deeply satisfying about getting your kids to school on a bike bus. You get an almost smug feeling—the perfect word for it, in Yiddish, is “kvelling”—about your community, about how you’re raising your child to be active and social and carbon-free. (Part of this euphoria is certainly the surging endorphins triggered by exercise and loud music.) Then, when your kids are older and can ride the bike bus without you, just pop on a helmet and pedal down the road to school, it feels sort of retro. When so much of parenting now is holding back an avalanche of screens and apps, and doing it in isolation, bike buses feel undeniably right and good.

Balto first got that feeling—more than a feeling, an epiphany—in Boston at one of his first teaching jobs. After a childhood in the Washington, D.C., suburbs playing ice hockey, Balto became a gym teacher “as a way to continue being a camp counselor.” He moved to Portland in 2010 for a girl. They broke up, but Balto met his now-wife through work at King Elementary in Northeast Portland. By 2014, Balto was getting his master’s in physical education at Boston University. He did his first walking school bus (same concept, subtract the bikes) that year.

“I was totally transformed,” he says. “My eyes were open to the possibilities and joy of active transportation to school.”

Students got more exercise and parents escaped the chaos of school car lines. As a PE teacher, Balto saw benefits during the school day too, many of which are backed by data. Students retain information better when they bike to school and are less wiggly in class. They have increased independence and confidence and better social relationships, and they get into less trouble. “I call it the Swiss Army knife of our issues,” Balto says.

Balto moved back to Portland in 2018 and started a walking school bus at César Chávez K-8 in North Portland, where he was the PE teacher. In 2021, he switched to Alameda and also saw a video that would change the direction of his advocacy—and career. It was of the bicibús (bike bus) in Barcelona, Spain, one of the first leaders of this wave of school biking, and one of the largest.

This was his second “aha” moment: Walking school buses don’t go viral. Bike buses do. He launched the Alameda bike bus in spring 2022.

Balto brings his Ted Lasso-type energy to every bike bus. He plays loud music, says “whee!” when his e-bike motor powers on, and calls kids “buddy.” “Hey, how’s swim lessons going?” he asks one student. To another: “I’ve got a bike for you to borrow because yours is a little small for you. Is that cool?”

But he’s got some edge too. His reaction when Benson Boone confirmed his attendance on the Vernon bike bus about two hours before the start time: “Oh, fuck, this is happening.” On parents riding the bike bus with their children after about third grade: “Stay home.”

With his dark mustache, glasses and high-visibility Bike Bus jacket, he is so recognizable that a group of PBOT employees dressed up as a bike bus for Halloween last year, the leader wearing a black paper beard to match the one Balto had grown at the time.

Portland actually had a bike bus movement before, starting in 2010. They were called “Bike Trains” back then, and they were also led by parent organizers and got some local press coverage. But they disappeared by 2013. Balto sees bike trains as a cautionary tale of what can happen to a movement if it doesn’t get enough support from places like PBOT and Portland Public Schools, and if nobody is constantly improving the infrastructure around schools to make the routes safer.

“When initiatives don’t get support, they die,” Balto says. “We’ve taken a lot of lessons from that and tried to run a different course from the one that led to bike trains fizzling out.”

Portland city leaders are taking more than just costume inspiration from Balto these days. This May through October, PBOT launched its own City Bike Bus once a month for adults to commute downtown for work. Nine different routes snaked from every corner of the city to the Salmon Street Springs fountain for coffee, pastries and a group photo. Some parents led their children’s bike bus, then joined up with the city bike bus to continue on to work, says PBOT director Millicent Williams.

Even more grown-ups are catching up to the bike bus trend: Oregon Health & Science University rolled out its first employee bike bus in May, and regional government body Metro ran one all summer.

PBOT has earmarked $500,000 of gas tax money for improving neighborhood greenways that bike buses use. The bureau is scrambling to install enough bike racks at schools to accommodate the surging demand for bike storage from all the bike buses.

“Part of this is a bit of a wildfire, in a positive way,” Williams says. “We’re catching up to the flame that’s burning so brightly.”

In September, Metro kicked in $50,000 for PBOT to install new signage for bike bus routes to nine Portland elementary schools. At the state level, the Bike Bus Bill was signed into Oregon law in 2023, giving schools more flexibility in how they spend state transportation funds. That means the money can go to bike buses, not just traditional yellow school buses.

There’s no shame in the government playing catch-up to a grassroots movement, Williams says.

“Good ideas don’t only come from one place. I don’t think we should feel like we cornered the market on how to transform the infrastructure, or how to change people’s minds on how to best use it. I think it’s great that it came from the community.”

It will come as little surprise, however, that PBOT wishes it had more money to invest in infrastructure upgrades. For its part, PPS lacks enough staff. It has one Safe Routes to School coordinator, overseeing the entire district’s 81 schools. A better model is just east in Hood River, where the school district has one part-time coordinator overseeing nine schools—a much more appropriate workload, Balto says.

With a lack of adequate staffing and investment from the powers that be, the workload falls on parents. And not every school has an army of moms and dads ready to organize routes, communicate with the school, don safety vests, and cork intersections at 7:30 am.

You need five things to build a bike bus: Kids need to have bikes, and they need to know how to ride them. There must be a passable level of infrastructure in the neighborhood. There must be a ride leader, preferably paid. And, finally, there must be secure bike parking at home and on ground level at school.

Schools with fewer resources than Alameda struggle to replicate the bike bus concept.

When Balto left César Chávez K-8 for Alameda in 2021, he handed all of the bike bus routes to parent Blake Goud to keep it going. It hasn’t been all pop stars and viral videos since.

Goud has a kindergartner and a fifth grader at the school and serves as secretary of the Parent Teacher Association. Goud rides an Urban Arrow electric cargo bike, often while wearing a rain cape, a getup a group of third graders have dubbed the Batmobile. César Chávez is one of the most diverse schools in all of Portland, with 27 languages spoken among the student body, according to PPS enrollment statistics. Goud writes all of the bike bus flyers in both English and Spanish, but that doesn’t reach every family.

César Chávez’s bike bus is in its fourth year, but the crowds are smaller than Alameda’s. It swelled to 50 participants on a sunny September morning, but a typical ride is more like a dozen or two. Every bus has one route that is a hybrid walk-and-roll format.

“Not everyone feels welcome in the bike culture,” Goud says. “We just want to be as inclusive as possible.”

Having enough volunteers to run the full three-prong route to the Portsmouth neighborhood school is a challenge, as are other basics, such as weather-appropriate clothing. Some students were wearing trash bags as rain gear, so Goud brought them ponchos, for example.

Goud’s bike bus has some challenging infrastructure, especially for the route that crosses busy North Portsmouth Avenue. “Our area of town has a lot of crashes,” Goud says. A student was hit by a car while crossing Portsmouth in 2020. If parents don’t feel safe sending their kids on the bike bus, that’s a deal breaker.

Bike buses put infrastructure failings in sharp relief. PBOT director Williams would love to improve streets “not necessarily because the bike bus has pushed us to do it, but because we’ve been able to forecast and do what needs to be done.”

They’re not there yet. Jessica Fletcher is a mother of two at James John Elementary in the St. Johns neighborhood and serves as the bike bus organizer there. PBOT chose James John as a pilot school for bike bus investments, which is great because the neighborhood has “every bad behavior you can imagine,” Fletcher says: speeding, double-parking and drivers using the greenway as a cut-through street.

Both James John and César Chávez are Title I schools, meaning a high percentage of students come from low-income families. Fletcher spends hours networking with parents, asking if their children have bikes and know how to ride them.

The James John bike bus is usually a dozen kids long; once it got up to 40. “I really feel like it’s going to pop next year,” Fletcher says.

Fletcher works with PBOT to host an annual “learn to ride” event, and with Metro to run bike giveaways. That’s a program where Metro rescues bikes from being recycled at the dump, then turns them over to nonprofits like Reborn Bikes that refurbish them and hand them out to kids and families. One family showed up with nine people, so they got nine bikes.

“I wouldn’t love doing bike bus if I couldn’t do a bike giveaway, because I would feel bad. Like, ‘Oh, yeah, look at all these white people doing this,’” says Fletcher, who is white. “I had to figure out the bike giveaway first.”

She’s now paid a stipend by the nonprofit organization Oregon Walks for leading walking school buses, though she worked for free for four years. Sometimes it’s hard for her to watch other public schools’ immediate success.

“They said, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ But I’ve been building it for four years!”

But far from being jealous of Balto’s viral success, Fletcher just sees them as having different roles. It’s like any group ride, she says.

“Sam’s job is to be the mascot and be out in front and say, ‘This is what is possible for all of us.’ On every ride, there has to be a ride leader and there have to be sweeps. Sam is the leader and Blake [at César Chávez] and I are the sweeps in the back. We make sure no one gets left behind.”

The way Sam Balto sees it, City Hall left him and other volunteers a vacuum to fill for reasons that boil down to two words: “no vision.” He’s encouraged by the new form of government that began at the city of Portland in 2025, with a 12-member City Council.

“I believe it’s a much better form of government,” he says, “and it gives us bike bus leaders a lot of hope. Now I really believe there can be a significant impact, and we’ve had a ton of city counselors join and participate and see the value of bike buses.”

The list of politicians who have ridden bike buses to learn about the trend (and as adorable, green-tinted photo opps) is long, including City Councilors Tiffany Koyama Lane, Mitch Green, Sameer Kanal and Elana Pirtle-Guiney, and Mayor Keith Wilson, when he was campaigning for office. But translating enthusiasm into policy is another matter.

Koyama Lane says she’s trying. Inspired by conversations with bike bus leaders and her personal goal to ride every single bike bus in District 3, Koyama Lane has directed her office to draft an ordinance that would lower the amount of car traffic on four different neighborhood greenways that intersect with bike bus routes.

“It’s important that the legislation is with and by the community,” Koyama Lane says. “We have to tap into that energy and bring those folks in. They are going to make our work better.”

Up next for the bike bus, Balto always has his eye on Moda Center’s schedule to try to coordinate with more musicians. Until then, the Alameda bike bus’s newest collab just dropped on Instagram and TikTok: a short film made with Netflix in advance of the fifth season premiere of Stranger Things on Nov. 26. A pink sunrise washes across the Beaumont-Wilshire sky as 180 kids bike to school while dressed as Eleven or Mike or wearing “Hellfire Club” T-shirts (a reference to Season 4).

Balto leads the pack wearing a Hawkins sheriff’s uniform. He starts the ride in a familiar way.

“When I say Stranger, you say Things. Stranger!”

“Things!” shout the children.

“Stranger!”

“Things!”

“We’re going to save the world today. Are you all ready for that?” Balto says. “Nobody gets left behind. Not in my town. Let’s roll.”