“IT movement, not a moment. “This is the Mantra from the” trainer “Palto, a former teacher at Portland School, Oregon, who left his daily function to eagerly a revolution called” bicycle ” – groups of children and families revolving around the school together.
How did one person in a medium -sized American city convert a weekly bike riding into something from the phenomenon? He bent over the strength of social media. In the past two years, hundreds of millions of millions have been seen.
Bicycle to school should not be great, but it has almost became extinct in the United States after decades of paternity and helicopter, cities directed to cars and a pawing of dangerous and toxic cars that accompany it.
The world that restores a threatened type, around Balto, represented his passion for the benefits of physical activity among young people to a direction that moved from his current city in the northwest of the Pacific to the White House in Washington, DC (where former President Joe Biden invited him to attend a holiday reception), and beyond. Today, Balto is estimated that there are more than 200 bicycle buses across the United States.
They were present for a while. In Portland, a The “bike train” movement began in 2010 When a 24 -year -old bicycle lawyer, Kiel Johnson, began organizing what he referred to as “bicycle trains” in an elementary school, where the bicycles will join a block of cyclists at a different pause along a road to school. I was caught, and in just a few months, Johnson registered in six other schools, won a grant, and was interviewed by a national TV program.
He also used Facebook to publish information and communicate with other bicycle train leaders, but the video – unlike one downloaded on YouTube in 2010 which barely reached 1000 total views – was not part of the image. Johnson now recalls: “When I joined a big bike trains, I really felt that you were part of something – we had no way to share it,” Johnson now recalls. “Social media did not have this ability at that time.”
This will be a few years ago before sharing videos on Vine, Tiktok and X (then Twitter) will be prevalent. However, Johnson found success without increasing social media, showing the viral potential of the bicycle. He has also proven that it is a challenge, because without viral videos to reach millions in the minutes, Johnson had to do a lot of this work himself. This lack of expansion was one of the reasons why he could not continue to push bicycle trains forward. In 2012, two years after they started, the bicycle train reached the end of the line.
But great ideas have a way to survive. Nearly a decade, while on a trip to Spain, a California resident of Zach Klein coincided with a large group of schools who were riding in the streets of Barcelona and took a video. “Something special happens in BarcelonaIt was published on X on October 18, 2021. Klein Virusi’s publication was gone It was picked up four days after the National Public RadioThen spread on the Internet like wildfire. Whoever saw that he was Balto.
In the next spring, he recalled Balto, then a physical education teacher at an elementary school, that Bicibús is a video from Spain and decided to try one of it. He developed a plan for a “bicycle bus for Earth Day” – a group journey that meets about one mile of school and capturing children and parents on bicycles all the way.
“I think this is the beginning of something really special here,” Balto He said since the beginning of the trip that morning. It turned out that this was a tremendous underestimation. Children love her, and why don’t they do that? Benefits, after all, to ride biking regularly. It is good for children’s health – mental and physical – and he also has Advantages effect For all family members, Anyone also argues. Many Balto students say that the best thing on a bicycle bus is that it is simply a wonderful thing about friends.
But the excitement exceeded the school. Not only did students ask for enthusiasm to ride again the next week, but videos have exceeded anything that Balto could imagine. When he published his first clip from the Earth Day Bus on April 22, 2022, he was monitored more than 200,000 times. That was just the beginning.
In September 2022, one of the videos on the bicycle bus received more than 1 million views on Tiktok. A week later, one of the parents posted a video of the bicycle bus that got more than millions of views overnight. Remember to look at his phone the next morning and shout: “The holy shit! The holy shit!” For himself. On the same day, he received NBC, CBS, Access Hollywood emails and other media.
Over the next three years, Balto has moved from a bicycle activist in Portland to the famous Internet. Last month, Justin Timberlake joined his bicycle bus after he surrendered to urged Balto and his animal from his followers on Tijhak and Instagram. Timberlake was performing that night and appeared in advance to the Baldas alongside the hundreds of children and fans. The video of this trip contains 3.2 million views. Last year alone, Balto videos were watched more than 200 million times.
Balo, who is now He runs the world of non -profit bicycleIt presents social media to build the movement. “Without it, this may have been just a wonderful local initiative in Barcelona. But social media made it universal. The vision also helped change the general perception of cycling to school, proving that it is enjoyable, safe and developed.”
Balto is right that moments are not movements, but as long as the moments can be captured and share on social media, then movements are followed.