For the Love of Biking

I’ve all the time beloved bike driving. For enjoyable, for transportation, for train, it doesn’t matter, I really like all of it (besides spin class). While as a toddler I relied on adult-navigated types of transport in my day after day life–a bus, a taxi, my mother and father’ automobile–it was throughout the summers that we spent in Florida the place I skilled the unbridled pleasure and freedom that got here from getting access to and driving a motorbike. 

Now as a dad or mum with two younger kids, I’m dedicated to introducing them to the enjoyment of motorcycle driving. After transferring to Saint Paul in 2025, I noticed a chance in my neighborhood’s quiet tree-lined streets that look straight out of a Hallmark film. I purchased a cargo bike and after a several-year break from biking after being hit by a automobile, I’m rediscovering how enjoyable it’s to experience a motorbike. One of the issues that made it straightforward to get again into biking are the numerous passionate teams of individuals I’ve met within the biking neighborhood who usually are not simply enthusiastic about biking but additionally about methods to make streets safer and extra accessible to everybody. One such group is Kidical Mass Saint Paul, a gaggle that organizes family-friendly bike rides across the metropolis.

Kidical Mass rides are an organized group bicycle experience focused at kids and households utilizing roads and streets. The concept is to make biking extra seen, particularly kids biking, and to assist get children and households extra snug with biking on the highway. The rides additionally assist to remind drivers that streets are shared areas, that youngsters have a proper to bike within the highway too, and that they’ve a proper to impartial mobility. 

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In a current survey by the American Enterprise Institute, a stunning proportion of youngsters and youths usually are not allowed to depart even their road unaccompanied by an grownup. When I used to be in center college I largely simply rode round my suburban neighborhood streets, however biking meant that I may shout, “I’M GOING TO AMANDA’S HOUSE!”, slam the storage door and depart with out my mother ever having seen my face that morning. My bike gave me the flexibility to go to mates and transfer round my neighborhood by myself, one thing that just about a 3rd of 17-year-olds within the United States usually are not even allowed to do.

The first Kidical Mass experience was in Eugene, Oregon on April 18, 2008 and since then the motion has unfold to many cities throughout the globe. The group takes its identify from Critical Mass, group bike rides that take over streets and function a protest to carry consideration to cyclists and biking infrastructure. Unlike Critical Mass rides, Kidical Mass are extra household and kid-oriented with rides being gradual, brief (round 3 miles), and on bike-friendly streets or paths.

There are two predominant Kidical Mass chapters in Minnesota, one in Saint Paul and one in Minneapolis. In Minnesota, rides are usually held from spring by way of fall and rides often begin and finish at a family-friendly vacation spot like a park or playground.

The Saint Paul Kidical Mass group rides are at present organized by Rachel Wiken, a transportation bike owner since faculty and mother of two within the Macalester-Groveland neighborhood of Saint Paul, and Mary Alivia Tolsma, mother of two and a former Twin Cities year-round bike owner who mentioned she reluctantly began driving for her medical job at age 27. Wiken is a Senior Transportation Planner at Metropolitan Council and Tolsma is a Certified Physician Assistant. They rebooted the group in 2025 after a hiatus that started in 2020 throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2019, Tolsma began the Saint Paul chapter with a pal as a result of getting her children and bikes over the river to take part within the Minneapolis-based rides was difficult. She needed one thing extra accessible to herself and others in Saint Paul. When Tolsma wanted a brand new co-lead for the reboot, Wiken was already searching for a approach to be concerned, having loved collaborating in group rides prior to now as an grownup. She needed to introduce that to her children, “I wanted my kids to experience that fun of being in a big rolling group,” Wiken instructed me after I requested about her motivations.

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Both Wiken and Tolsma imagine that the Kidical Mass rides are a great way for youths to study biking expertise on the road and assist construct confidence in younger riders. 

“I feel strongly that having visibility of kids on bikes in the neighborhood encourages other families to bike as well,” mentioned Wiken. 

The first experience of the 2026 season kicked off on a cold Saturday afternoon the final week in April. When I obtained to the park that was the gathering place for the experience, it was straightforward to identify who else was there for Kidical Mass – a lot of cargo and kid-bikes clustered close to a tree. When it was time for the group to roll out, Wiken supplied a fast overview of the route earlier than main the pack on the experience. Of the twenty or so riders, about half had been kids driving on their very own. At least one grownup rider was current when crossing intersections to make sure that everybody made it by way of safely and that nobody obtained separated. We made our means primarily down smaller, quiet streets or streets with bike lanes or paths. The experience had a languid tempo appropriate for little legs and wheels and most of the people chatted alongside the roughly 30-minute, 2.5 mile experience. At one level a big truck headed down the small road in direction of our group, transferring in the other way. The group shifted to accommodate the car. “Car up!” adults known as out. “Cars bad,” quipped the child on a cargo bike subsequent to me.

As we headed down a bigger highway with little site visitors, a automobile trailed our group. “Should we let this guy pass?” I heard somebody ask. Rachel’s husband, Dave, defined that our group was “taking the lane”. Under Minnesota law, cyclists can “take the lane” when the lane will not be large sufficient to share with a car. This is a secure approach to be seen and alerts that vehicles ought to use the opposite lane to soundly go. I feel this studying by way of commentary and studying by doing are such necessary elements of Kidical Mass. Most children will in some unspecified time in the future experience their bike on the street and most children is not going to have been taught find out how to safely accomplish that or what rights cyclists have when sharing the highway with automobiles. These are classes I want I had been uncovered to earlier and that might have doubtless prevented my very own bike accident as an grownup.

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Kidical Mass rides haven’t been with out their challenges. 

“Saint Paul bike routes are not protected, do not connect, and do not safely cross busy intersections. Biking a route with the mind “can a five- or six-year-old do this safely?’ really changes what you think is safe. We desperately need more protected bike infrastructure in Saint Paul. And we need lanes and paths to not magically disappear when crossing big streets,” mentioned Wiken, discussing how troublesome it may be to seek out secure routes to guide a gaggle of younger and inexperienced riders. 

Despite these challenges, Saint Paul Kidical Mass rides are chaperoned by merely a couple of adults on bikes to help with crossings and at lights. In Phoenix, Arizona, the place I moved from, a Kidical Mass group was fashioned in 2025. Smart Growth America’s Dangerous by Design 2026 report ranks Arizona because the third deadliest state for folks strolling. Wide roads with many lanes and few pedestrian crossings make many Phoenix streets dangerous for walkers and cyclists alike. The Phoenix Kidical Mass group solely holds one annual ride and they’re accompanied by a police escort to help at significantly troublesome crossings and intersections.

Neighborhoods and cities usually are not constructed to think about how kids will journey and transfer round and Saint Paul isn’t any exception. 

“We have a long way to go before most families would feel comfortable with their young rider biking independently,” Wiken says. 

As a pre-driving teenager, my bike rides expanded past our neighborhood and my bike grew to become a means for me to discover my broader neighborhood independently. What can we lose as a neighborhood when children can’t safely transfer round of their neighborhoods and streets?

The freedom to play and discover with out consistently being below the direct supervision of a dad or mum or different grownup is a vital a part of childhood and helpful to kids’s improvement. There is a growing body of evidence that impartial and collaborative play with friends will help make extra targeted, glad children who’re capable of downside remedy, work by way of battle, and work cooperatively with out an grownup stepping in. In an age of tech-saturated childhoods and adolescences, biking affords an exercise that may be communal and builds accountability and fosters connection. Biking is a software that may join children to a play-based childhood. But simply having a motorbike doesn’t imply that you’ll routinely have the liberty to maneuver round in the neighborhood, whilst an grownup. 

As Seth Kaplan writes in “The Real User Interface: Recovering Our Neighborhoods”, “our planners and engineers have built a physical landscape optimized for cars but minimized for relationships…This is especially problematic for children, whose opportunities for spontaneous free play—and the constructive friction that self-organized activities create—are further limited when the physical landscape discourages exploration.” 

In many cities within the United States, the bodily panorama considerably limits secure impartial exploration for kids and even adults. According to the National Center for Safe Routes to School, 48% of youngsters 5 to 14 years of age often walked or bicycled to highschool in 1969. This quantity dropped to 13% in 2009 and was at 11% in 2022 in accordance with the National Household Travel Survey. When citing obstacles to biking and strolling to highschool, over 60% of oldsters talked about distance however one other 30% had been involved about traffic-related hazard. Formal applications like Minnesota Safe Routes to School and Walk! Bike! Fun! developed and administered by the Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota are working to make strolling and biking safer and extra accessible to children and college students. Less formal group rides like those organized by Kidical Mass teams and native bike retailers just like the Perennial Cycle Family Fun Rides, assist help these objectives by offering a enjoyable means for households to bike collectively. After all, along with being a type of transportation, biking can also be simply plain enjoyable.

I feel biking to bike, not simply as a type of transit or sport, is effective and fosters connection. That limiting bodily panorama that Kaplan talks about? That extends to adults as properly. According to the American Enterprise Institute, solely 25 p.c of younger adults discuss to their neighbors at the very least a couple of occasions per week, down from 51 p.c in 2012. One of the most effective methods to attach with neighbors is just by strolling across the neighborhood – 55 p.c of Americans who stroll round their neighborhood at the very least as soon as every week say they discuss to their neighbors at the very least a couple of occasions every week. Taking a stroll across the neighborhood looks like a easy sufficient apply to undertake, however not all neighborhoods are structured in such a approach to encourage (and even tolerate) pedestrian exercise (see “Art-A-Whirl Demonstrates the Need for Better Infrastructure in Northeast MPLS”).

This is the place group bike rides could make all of the distinction. There is security in numbers, so come on out and let’s bike collectively.

The Phoenix Kidical Mass group didn’t exist after I lived there and I by no means imagined that it may. Over the previous few years bike infrastructure has been added and improved. A protected bike lane now runs by way of the intersection the place I obtained hit. The bikers encourage the infrastructure and the infrastructure creates extra bikers.

What’s nice about Kidical Mass is that anybody can begin a gaggle and it’s all the time a enjoyable time. For Wiken, she noticed a lacking tradition that she needed to create, “There were family rides happening in Minneapolis but they were too far away to make work logistically and the timing never fit with my kids’ schedule. So I figured if I wanted that culture in my neighborhood, I should build it!” and she or he did.

I used to like biking for the liberty it enabled me, I may simply hop on a motorbike and go. Now I really like biking as a result of it’s a means for me to journey by way of my neighborhood whereas being part of it, not shut out by a automobile. I can wave to mates and neighbors or cease to speak. Having lived in deserts for almost fifteen years of my life, I relish feeling the completely different climate of every season and experiencing their accompanying scents: firewood within the fall, peonies and lilacs in bloom within the spring, and mowed lawns in the summertime. Riding my bike makes me really feel like a child. Given that adults benefit from playing as much as children do, even simply driving for enjoyable is useful. If you might be nervous about biking by yourself as a household or wish to uncover new family-friendly routes (and check out some new playgrounds), organized group rides are a unbelievable introduction to biking on streets for all ages. Summer in Minnesota is the right time to begin driving.

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