Generally, a bike bus consists of one or more adult supervisors, often parents, who guide a group of students along a defined ‘route’ to one or more schools. Most bike buses run once a week, with only 10% operating daily (Honey-Rosés 2024). Published information on bike buses is limited but growing due to their relatively recent development. Bike buses fit within the larger framework of ATS and Safe Routes to Schools (SRTS). SRTS programs have a longer history than bike buses, with states like Florida and California developing programs in the 1990s, followed by the passage of federal legislation in 2005 (Weigand 2008). This review primarily addresses research based on ATS and SRTS to determine a baseline for pre-existing influences to bike bus creation, management and sustainability.

Bike buses can be situated within the larger body of literature about ATS and SRTS but deserve research on their own merits for a variety of reasons. This literature review found more research on walking than biking as a form of ATS, but walking and biking are different behaviors and the predictors are likely to differ from those of walking. One meta-analysis of ATS studies found that 70% of papers combined biking and walking in their research, and of the 30% that examined only one, a majority were focused exclusively on walking (Lu et al. 2014). Biking has the potential to expand the available area of impact as seen in disaggregated data on walking and biking distances (Kweon et al. 2023,) and thus has potential to also challenge the research focus on urban areas, but not suburban or rural areas where distances are greater.

Other areas where bike buses differ from the available research include the impact traveling in a group has on ATS adoption as most ATS studies focus on individual student behaviors and mode choices. The group nature of bike buses has the potential to affect perceptions around safety (both from crime, and from traffic) as well as provide benefits not found in individual travel modes (such as socialization opportunities for parents and students.) Additionally, bike buses have the additional upfront cost of owning and operating a vehicle (a bike) which is understudied from an economic or equity perspective (Jacob et al. 2021, McDonald et al. 2016).

Lastly, bike buses have the potential to leverage the last twenty years of SRTS interventions, ensuring that the miles of bike lanes, sidewalks and crosswalks funded by districts, communities, states and the federal government have their full value realized. Persistently low ATS adoption, in spite of these investments, indicates that simply building a bike lane is insufficient to shift modes for many parents and students. Bike buses, as a new way of navigating those interventions, have enormous potential and deserve further attention and research.