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The Rise of the “Bike Bus” Movement
01 On Earth Day* 2022, Sam Balto, a physical education teacher in Portland, convinced a few
02 dozen parents to send their kids to school on their bikes and posted the first in a series of videos
03 that turned his “bike bus” into a viral sensation. Balto has continued documenting his weekly
04 bike buses with joyous videos that show students rolling to school while he blasts music from an
05 eclectic collection of artists, including AC/DC, Metallica, and OneRepublic. Over time, these
06 boisterous bike buses have grown to more than 150 kids. “The more these kids practice riding
07 bikes, the more confident they become. And now they want to keep riding on non-bike bus days,
08 and even on rainy days!” said Balto.
09 Balto’s bike bus is much more than a fad. His TikTok and Twitter videos have raked in
10 millions of views, inspiring similar initiatives in New York, New Jersey, Florida, Utah, Ohio, and
11 Texas. Bike buses previously existed in European cities such as Barcelona and London, but new
12 ones in cities like Cape Town are now joining the trend. Nancy Pullen-Seufert, the director of the
13 National Center for Safe Routes to School, said biking and walking to school have myriad benefits,
14 including “improving air quality, improving safety for walkers and bicyclists, increasing physical
15 activity, and making it easier for school buses and others who can’t actively travel to school to
16 arrive to school on time.”
17 Balto has also triggered real political change by working with lawmakers to pass a so-called
18 “Bike Bus Bill”, that was signed into law by Oregon Governor Tina Kotek in August. “The bill
19 brings flexibility so school districts can now use student transportation funds, which were
20 previously only for school buses, to pay for crossing guards or adults to lead walking school buses
21 or bike buses. It’s awesome.” Balto said. And he is not the only bike bus leader driving positive
22 change in Oregon… Last year, Megan Ramey, who has been organizing a bike bus ___ 2020, was
23 named the Safe Routes to School Manager at Hood River County School District and since then,
24 she has secured nearly $11 million in funding to make it safer for kids to walk and bike to school.
25 “I feel like I'm in a cash-grabbing machine. We just got $7 million to create an off-road trail to
26 the high school. This means kids will be able to bike to high school on a green trail instead of a
27 car-centered road,” said Ramey.
28 Nearly 90% of kids walked to school in 1969. Half a century later, in 2017, that number
29 had fallen to just 10%. That year, a third of students took the school bus and more than half
30 were driven in a private vehicle. This has led to more pollution, with researchers finding that
31 toxic car fumes have an adverse effect on attention, reasoning, and academic performance
32 among school children. In New York, the Open Schools Program has helped increase biking and
33 walking in the 65 schools that restricted traffic during drop-off and pick-up times this year, said
34 Sabina Sethi Unni, who works at Open Plans, a non-profit that supports the shift to walkable
35 cities. “This program makes kids more comfortable with walking and biking at a young age. When
36 they get older, they will be cyclists instead of car users,” said Unni.
(Available in: https://www.distilled.earth/p/the-rise-of-the-bike-bus-movement – text especially adapted for this test).
*Earth Day: a day in April designated for promoting concern for the environment (Merriam-Webster).
The word that correctly completes the gap in line 22 is: