Bike bus calendar for the 2025/2026 school year – always on Fridays!
– 19th September
– 3rd and 31st October
– 14th and 28th November
– 12th December
– 9th and 23rd January
– 6th February
– 6th and 20th March
– 1st, 15th, and 29th May
– 12th and 26th June
Next bike bus
We start at 08:20, congregating at the junction with Charterhall Road and Blackford Avenue. We aim to get to school for 08:40.
If you are new to the bike bus or are not sure your child will manage the hills, we would love to see you, and would also ask that you accompany your child in case of mechanical incident (for example). We will, of course, do everything we can to help everyone along and encourage the group to stay together.
Please make sure you read our guidelines for taking part in the bike bus.
Please check back here, or on Bluesky or Mastodon, to confirm the date.
We follow the route shown on this map.
If your child is attending the bike bus please also attend with them, as it is important in the event of an accident or mechanical failure that someone can stop and help.
There is no formal procedure for joining in en route, but try to find a space to filter in or start riding at the front of the bus when you see it and let the leaders catch you up and allow the existing bike bus subsume you!
For confident parent cyclists who have children who are doing well it is really helpful to be aware that at certain points – for example the junction of South Oswald road and Oswald road, we should block the traffic and allow the children to pass safely. Please thank drivers who stop for us, but do not put yourself in danger if a driver becomes impatient. If necessary, we will stop the bus to allow them past, but in our experience most drivers are very happy to see the kids passing by and in general they will be delayed by no longer than a minute or so. We are lucky enough sometimes to have the police accompany us, which always proves a hit!
The Astley Ainslie staff are kindly opening the North gate and waiting at some potentially tricky junctions. Please thank them as you go past.
The risk assessment for the route can be viewed here.
The entire bike bus can be seen on this video from the ride on the 3rd May – this should give a good idea of what it is like to those that are not aware:
Previously…
Over 6 years ago, the inaugural JGPS bike bus held on the 22nd March 2019 was a rip-roaring success, with 162 people taking part, and we are still going strong, even winning the occasional award!
The last nine bike buses had roughly 120-140 taking part in each and were all great successes. We were lucky enough to have excellent photographer Andy Catlin join us for the one on the 17th June who took some amazing photos – please click on the image below to preview the whole album or to purchase individual photos.
The second bike bus on the 3rd May was also a great success as can be seen from the video:
Here’s a “fly-past” from our excellent volunteer rear-marker Robert Gormley of the bike bus on the 17th May: