St. Johns families can get on the bike bus, thanks to donation event

The covered section of the playground at James John Elementary School in St. Johns would normally be quiet and empty on a rainy day after school. But this past Friday was anything but normal as the playground buzzed with activity and over 45 local families showed up to pick out free bikes.

“It’s a good ol’ bike fest!” said Joe Kurmaskie, an author known as the “Metal Cowboy” for his series of books about family bike adventures who’s now the executive director of Reborn Bikes, a statewide organization that expects to give away 12,000 bikes this year. Kurmaskie and his team, along with Metro, Portland Public Schools, Trauma Nurses Talk Tough, Bike Bus PDX, and others, distributed about 130 free bikes, helmets, lights, and locks at the event.

James John Elementary has an active bike bus that has spurred demand for bikes among the school community. Bike Bus leader and mom Jessica Fletcher has stepped up to meet the need. “I have become the biking lady here at our school,” she said. Fletcher has seen the bike bus grow in popularity, but realized a lot of kids were left out. She did a school survey and found 50% of the students don’t even have a bike and that half the families driving to school wanted to ride instead. “So I just felt like, there can’t be this wonderful thing that everybody’s doing and then so many kids can’t do it because they don’t even have a bicycle.”

Fletcher connected with Kurmaskie and others in the community, and the event fell into place thanks to a lot of planning and volunteers.

One of the folks helping out yesterday was John Brandsberg, a hazardous waste technician at Metro. He works with Kurmaskie to keep bicycles out of the waste transfer station (a.k.a. dump). Since the duo teamed up in the summer of 2023, they’ve rescued 2,200 bikes that would otherwise be sent to landfills. “These bikes used to get recycled, which is a good deal,” Brandsberg shared on Saturday, “But giving them to kids so they can ride bikes is so much better.”

Kids like that are what keeps Kurmaskie going. He estimates that his refurbished-bikes-to-bike-bus pipeline supplies about 30-40% of bikes used in Portland’s growing number of bike buses. “Which is a really cool thing, because it makes it egalitarian. It makes it that everybody gets to do bike bus.”

And school leaders like Fletcher are happy to create the demand. “We had a kid that joined [the bike bus] last week who’s a first-grader and he said, ‘I want to get 100 kids on this bike bus’,” she shared. “So I think this is going to make that possible.”

A young James John Elementary student named Arlo provided living proof of concept. I met her as she got comfortable on a purple Trek Mountain Track. She told me she picked it out because, “I really like the handle brakes and I like how it has a cup holder. Plus, I just love the color and stuff.”

“Sometimes you can just feel what bike is right for you,” Arlo added, as she looked down at her new rig. When I asked what she’s looking forward to once she gets the bike home, Arlo said, “Oh, just riding a lot. I’m thinking of joining the bike bus.”