How to organise a bike bus
It’s the start of the school autumn term here in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, while Scottish pupils have already been back at school for a few weeks. This is a great time to start up a bike bus, helping the kids at your local school get there by bike safely while having fun.
Bike buses provide a safe, escorted route to school, avoiding busy roads and providing support to young riders. Parents, carers and pupils can join anywhere along the route, and it offers a fun, active way for the community to start the school day.
You can start small and informal: it could even be just your own children and a couple of school mates at the start. The Noss Primary School bike train in Caithness started in 2024 as a trial with just 22 pupils – it soon grew to 136 participants. It returned in August 2025.
Our guide will inspire you and take you through the steps required to get going.
Bike buses are like foodbanks – they shouldn’t need to exist. However, they meet a fundamental need which should be met by councils making better planning and highways decisions: the need for children to get to school safely and healthily under their own steam, without parents and carers feeling that their only option is to drive.
Decades of bad decisions by local councils, of underinvestment in suitable highways infrastructure, and a lack of leadership from national governments have meant that, for many families, cycling to school can seem like too dangerous an undertaking.
Bike buses help to counter this inaction and underinvestment. These rides protest the lack of existing safe cycle routes while highlighting the fact that we can’t get children to school safely with current infrastructure, as well as providing a safe, cheap, healthy and environmentally responsible way for children to get to school.
Bike buses are a great way to get children and their families involved with a fun, energetic demonstration of what needs to improve in their local area.
They are demonstration rides, with a very practical outcome every time: pupils arriving at school, on time and fresh for the day. They have the potential to be more persuasive to councillors and council officers than written reports or dry data.
The ultimate aims are to persuade local councils to provide safe, accessible routes to schools, and to build confidence for children and parents to feel they can cycle safely on roads
In the long term there is evidence that participation in bike buses increases the likelihood of people cycling to school informally, and reduces the traffic levels around schools, with the attendant benefits in air quality, pupil health and congestion.
Download the guide below which will help you through the why, the where, the who and the how – equipping you to add your bus to the growing fleet.
Please let us know how you get on.
