Drivers in Saratoga Springs may have to keep an extra eye out for students biking to school, and transportation advocates say that’s a good thing.
It’s a chilly fall morning on the West side of Saratoga Springs, and a handful of Lake Avenue Elementary School students are gathered with three chaperones.
Everyone is, of course, wearing a helmet, and one student is even wearing a hi-visibility yellow vest. This is what’s known as a bike bus, a trend picking up across the country to promote safe biking habits and to get kids to school in a sustainable, healthy way.
The ride takes a little more than 30 minutes, and the group picks up riders as they go along, just like a normal school bus would.
“It’s so important. We’re getting kids out on their bikes, it’s healthy, it’s fun, and we’re modeling behavior for their future,” said Ed Lindner.
Ed Lindner is with a local cycling advocacy group Bike-a-Toga. He says it’s important to instill safe habits in cyclists when they’re young.
The group calls out when they’re slowing and stopping to prevent a caravan pile-up, and they use hand signals to show when they’re turning.
Some are even able to bike with no hands – even if chaperones would prefer they didn’t.
“I do think it demonstrates that there’s a great need to complete the bike paths and lanes in the Complete Streets Plan. You know, people often today say kids don’t get out of their houses, they’re sitting on the couch with their screens, well here’s a group of Lake Avenue parents who are getting something done. They’re getting kids out and it would be great to have the infrastructure the city has planned for to make the city safer for everybody,” said Lindner.
The city’s finalized Complete Streets plan was published in 2016 and has remained incomplete.
Republican Public Works Commissioner Chuck Marshall tells WAMC that the city has roughly $5 million in state funding to expand sidewalk and bike routes throughout the city.
Marshall recently put out a Request for Proposals to build a much-anticipated Crescent Avenue connector, which would create a bike path connecting Nelson Avenue and Route 9.
3rd grader Ethan Ouderkirk is stopped to wait for the adults to figure out how to navigate some unexpected construction.
“The roadwork isn’t the best but I still like it that we can all ride together. And you can ride everyday but this is better because there’s more people who come,” said Ouderkirk.
Mom Kim London, who made the trip with her daughter’s violin strapped to her back, couldn’t be happier.
“You know because we live further away from town and we have a lot of stop signs and a little bit more traffic, but since we’ve been biking to school every Friday for the last couple months, she’s been more comfortable and I now feel confident that she can bike to town by herself, she’s been biking to the library in the summer by herself because she knows the route, she knows when to stop, she knows how to navigate traffic by herself and in the summer she was able to bike into town by herself. It’s been great,” said London.
Savannah Brockway says biking with her friends beats the normal bus any day.
“Um I think my favorite part about biking to school would be like instead of like taking the bust and having to deal with all the kids on the bus you can just be free and ride. And that’s just always fun,” said Brockway.
Tommy Novick, who rode to school on the back of his mom's bike, agrees.
"I've never taken the bus before and it also smells bad when I go on field trips," said Novick.
