Sam Balto took the idea from a local school to the White House and beyond, inspiring a global movement in which children feel the benefits of cycling together.
How did one person in a mid-sized American city turn a weekly bike ride into something of a phenomenon? He leaned on the power of social media.
In the past two years his videos have been viewed by hundreds of millions of people. Like a scientist restoring a threatened species, Balto turned his passion for the benefits of physical activity in young people into a trend that has gone from his current home town in the Pacific north-west to the White House in Washington DC where he was invited by former president Joe Biden to attend a holiday reception , and beyond.
Today, Balto estimates there are more than bike buses across the US. They have been around for a while. It caught on and in just a few months Johnson had signed up six other schools, won a grant, and had been interviewed by a national television show. It would be another few years before sharing videos on Vine, TikTok and X then Twitter would become mainstream. That Johnson found success without the boost of social media, however, showed the viral potential of the bike bus.
It also proved to be a challenge, because without viral videos to reach and inspire millions in minutes, Johnson had to do a lot of that work himself. In , two years after they started, the bike train movement had reached the end of the line.
