Fear and Loathing on the School Run

Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bike

Hard to believe I once wrote a love letter to the commute.

It was just after the pandemic. We were all processing it in strange ways.

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Nobody said parenting would be easy. But I doubt folks were honest enough with you about how hard the mornings would be. That you would—depending on your division of labour at home—spend your weekdays, rain or shine, pulling yourself out of bed, convincing tiny humans to do the same, and by sheer force of will getting those kids to the place they need to be (exactly) by the time they need to to be there (roughly). Hand ‘em over, relieved that they’re someone else's legal responsibility for around eight hours. Eventually, pick them up, getting what Jessi Klein called “a puddle’s worth of reflected sky” as you attempt to extract the bare minimum about their day.

But getting them out of the door? Eeeeeeesh. For a while, I would spend the beginning of each day making my daughter aware of The List of Specific Morning Things:

1. Get out of bed

2. Eat your breakfast

3. Brush your teeth

4. Put on your clothes

5. Pick up your school bag

This list implies the existence of its inverse—a list of frustratingly inessential activities, the Upside Down of getting out of the house each morning: building Lego, assembling puzzles, playing the piano, making Play-Doh, bickering—oh, the bickering! Anything not on the list was to be avoided at all costs.

Did this work out? What do you think? In yet another lesson in learning to let go, my morning dose of cortisol decreased significantly when I stopped trying to force them to my timetable and began to work to theirs. The school doesn’t follow my daughter’s laid-back attitude to time, and after having had her card marked late a few times, her early morning attitude began to shift after realising she was making herself late.

As they’ve gotten older, it’s gotten easier. The elder sibling makes breakfast for the younger one—the circle of life continues. It always feels like a miracle when they’re waiting with shoes on as I’m getting out of the shower, moaning at me to get a move on. It’s progress, and I’ll take it where I can.

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Getting out the door is only part of the puzzle.

Now you need to transport them from A to B via the most efficient and painless path possible—navigating obstacles physical, mental and societal. Because what is the drop off if not a modern day beauty pageant, humongous metal beasts taking the place of rehearsed waves and vaseline-slathered smiles? Cars have long been a status symbol; the school gates are now a battleground for ostentatious displays of said status. I went to primary school with a boy named Michael: he told us his dad drove a red Ferrari, but it was too nice to drop him off in the Manchester rain every morning. (This was, of course, not true. We all knew you were full of shit, Michael.)

There are no sports cars at the school gates—at least the one I'm dropping off at—but in their place are huge SUVs—every year, bigger, hungrier, more destructive. The numbers paint a stark picture: SUVs have grown from 20% of new car sales in 2010 to 58% in 2024. These vehicles have expanded in size and weight, with the average SUV now weighing nearly 4,500 pounds—about 1,000 pounds heavier than a regular car you’d have bought two decades ago. More than 40,000 Americans die in road traffic accidents every year, making US roads twice as dangerous (per mile driven) as those in other wealthy nations. And despite innovations in safety systems and driver assistance making cars safer, the number of pedestrians killed by motor vehicles has almost doubled since 2010.

A key part of our role as parents (and especially fathers) is to keep our children safe. For generations upon generations, we’ve done it, but whilst we once protected them from sabre-tooth tigers, now we defend them from other cars—an arms race played out in ever-growing hunks of steel. In our two years living in California, we never kicked the habit of standing next to monstrous trucks in car parks to take a photo. Whilst pickups haven’t yet hit drop-offs in non-US schools, the ever-growing SUV has become commonplace. Since 2001, EU cars have grown at a rate of 1cm (0.4in) every two years. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but if we were talking about that increase on your waistline, you’d be asking ChatGPT to put together a rigorous training schedule and diet plan. Tesla’s Cybertruck remains unreleased in Europe: depending on who you ask, it’s either because it will almost certainly fail the EU safety pedestrian protection regulations due to its rigid exterior, or that due to its size, drivers will need a C1 truck license to drive it legally. And that’s assuming your accelerator won’t get stuck in full pelt as you try to slow down, and you can survive getting attacked by plastic beads during a Mardi Gras parade.

@chercheur_de_veriteThis cyber truck got pelted so hard, the fools driving it called for police and turned off the route at Jackson Avenue. #Orpheus #MardiGras2025 #fuckfascism

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I’m not going to suggest, even for a minute, that “What do you drive?” is as prevalent and existential a question as “What do you do?” But they both perform a similar job: they exist to establish dominance, to understand where others sit in the pecking order. I’ve never been one to judge myself by what I drive—but I’m not immune to the curves of a well-designed automobile. I’ll be the first to point out a rare Porsche making its way through Barcelona whilst we’re on the school run, or enjoy our time in the new Polestar 2 that arrived after hailing a taxi with an app, my son marvelling from the back. But my adoration has always been as a spectator, not a participant. The cars I’ve bought have been, if not ludicrously capacious, then at least meticulously researched and adequate for purpose.

Studies have pegged the school run as contributing around a third of morning rush hour traffic. How did we get here? Last year, The Atlantic attempted to understand “How School Drop-Off Became a Nightmare:”

The car line is not just a chaotic place with potentially sobering implications for our health, the environment, and, according to some parents, school attendance. It’s also a lonely one. In it, parents wait in metal boxes with their kids and honk at their neighbors instead of connecting with them. Families struggle on their own through what is, in fact, a shared problem. Solving it would not only build community but also make schools more accessible to those who rely on them most.

If cars aren’t the answer, what is? Governments have been encouraging better ways to take our kids to school. In London, 2018’s introduction of a new ultra-low emissions zone led to four in ten families leaving the car behind and “walking, biking, scootering, or taking public transit.” In Germany, when people had access to cargo bikes (either their own bikes or through a bike share system), car ownership was reduced by 18%, along with many other impacts—financial, environmental and health-related. Multiple studies have uncovered the somewhat counterintuitive notion that an electronic bike is actually better exercise than a pedal one.

That was the path we took. After the pandemic, still car-less, we took the plunge and bought a battery-powered cargo bike. After weeks of research—and glowing recommendations from a few friends—we purchased an Urban Arrow, and it became our steel-framed magic carpet that we’d use to fly around the city. We'd zip down to the beach with snacks tucked into every crevice, with a parasol hoisted between the kids like a ship’s mast. They’d shriek with delight as we whipped across the city in record time, taking shortcuts through parks where cars couldn't follow, creating a mythology of adventure for us, and us alone. One Halloween, kids dressed in their outfits, I grabbed a Bluetooth speaker, and we thundered through the park playing Ray Parker Jr's “Ghostbusters.”

My friend Nic, who rides his around the streets of Amsterdam, said it made him feel “like Batman riding through Gotham in The Dark Knight.” I can see it: the bike has a low centre of gravity, meaning you lean into tight turns—it often feels more like steering a boat than riding a bike. It’s missing the Bat-Pod’s forward-facing, large-calibre cannons, but I think you can get those as an added extra on the website. I asked Justin, another friend living in Amsterdam, why he loved his so much:

It's not a car. I think what it comes down to is as simple as that. I grew up in the suburbs of Ottawa, where to get anywhere you needed to get into a car. And now that I've had a taste of life with the Urban Arrow, I would find it difficult to go back to that way of getting around. On top of it being good exercise, the kids are just happy to be in the bike. Even if you’re just running a bunch of errands, there’s a little adventure and fun for them to have the wind and the sun on their face. It’s more flexible, because if you pass something that looks great, it's easy to pull over, park the bike, hop out, go check it out and then continue on your way. Which you can't do with a car: you have to navigate traffic, find parking, pay for it, then remember where you parked. It allows for greater freedom, and that's really why I love it.

In 2023 British “personality” Adrian Chiles filed his weekly Guardian column—coming in at a whopping 407 words over five paragraphs, must be nice to get a salary for that—on “the new kind of class politics” created by the Urban Arrow, boggled at the idea that someone could spend “almost four grand” on a bicycle, whilst happily driving around in a BMW that cost at least 11 times the price (and that’s assuming he drives the base model, and I think we all know that Adrian Chiles doesn’t come across as a “base model” kind of guy).

Chiles has a point: these bikes aren’t cheap. But with the help of Ride to Work schemes, coupled with the money saved on parking, fuel, and maintenance, they can pay for themselves. And that’s before you even start factoring in the depreciation costs of a car. If you are buying this as well as a car, it can seem obscene. But if you’re buying one instead of? You’re off the hook for a monthly lease, road tax and repairs, and fuel rising way beyond what was once acceptable. A parking space in Barcelona costs €150 a month. If you’re in the middle of a city like New York or London, you’ll be paying double, if not triple, that. In the first three years we owned it, our Urban Arrow paid for itself in car park savings alone—#dadmath—and that’s before factoring in whatever price it might fetch on the resale market.

Barcelona was transformed during lockdown, with city officials adding 21km of cycle lanes while residents were stuck inside. We had a real lockdown here: thousands of children not allowed to leave the house, even once, for 98 days. We emerged with new bike lanes across the city; a decade’s worth of construction completed in a little over 3 months. The city was safer for cyclists, encouraging them to travel on new and widened cycle lanes, from mountain to beach, and everywhere inbetween. The “Bicibus” system started around this time. It now runs city-wide, allowing kids to safely cycle to school on main roads, grouping them together like schools of fish navigating the urban currents. Parents serve as "captains," bookending the procession to ensure safety, creating a mobile community growing at each pickup point, and a police escort isn’t an uncommon sight. Seeing thirty kids pedalling in formation reclaims roads in a way that feels revolutionary—children regaining control of the streets, experiencing freedom and responsibility whilst the cars wait behind them. What started as a pandemic-era experiment has become a cherished institution—one that teaches road safety and environmental consciousness without a single classroom lecture.

But all good things must end—for us, at least. My children are fast-approaching the age and size where they no longer fit in the bike, increasingly cramped even on short rides to the beach. Their combined weight, along with that of the Urban Arrow itself, tops 100kg. Even with a decent motor, that final incline towards school is getting harder by the week. Last year, we succumbed to the inevitable and bought a car. (A Volkswagen T-Roc, if you're wondering where that places me in your mental pecking order.) It's far from the fanciest car on the school run, but judging by the number of parents I see driving them in the morning, it's clear we've all done a similar cost/benefit analysis, decreeing them safe, efficient, and reliable enough to take the plunge.

The transition from cargo bike to car was more than a practical shift—it marked the end of a chapter where my children were literally carried by my strength (and a 250-watt Bosch motor providing electric assistance, but let’s not fixate on that). My kids sit behind me now, rather than in front; my ability to protect outsourced to seatbelts and side airbags, my ability to observe only possible through a rear view mirror. The school run continues to evolve as they do—from frantic early years of forgotten lunch boxes and mismatched socks to increasingly self-sufficient mornings where my role diminishes with each passing year.

We still take the bike out when we can, but with one kid in double digits, and another getting bigger by the day, its time is numbered.

One last ride into the sunset this summer, perhaps.

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3 things to read this week

1. “Electric Bike, Stupid Love of My Life” by Craig Mod. Primarily known for his walking—across Japan, checking out jazz cafes, and with Wired founder Kevin Kelly—Mod has also fallen in love with the electric bike. This essay, from September 2022, details the obsession, filled with writing as beautiful as this throughout: “I want to linger in this space as long as possible, this space of smooth and efficient movement through the world, gliding in near total mechanical silence, just the sound of rubber on the pavement, wind in my ears, breaking waves, salt, the smell of pine. This is what electric bikes do: They drive you insane with the poetry of the world.”

2. “An E-Bike Transformed My Family’s Life” by Elizabeth Endicott in The Atlantic. I had a shortlist of a dozen great essays online about how living with an E-Bike has transformed the life of a family, and in the end I went for this one. I mean, they named their bike Toby, and that personification leads to lovely passages where Endicott sees “how much easier Toby has made it to connect with my daughter,” and how “Toby can go up to 25 miles per hour, so I’ve explained the importance of slowing down for pedestrians.”

3. “The 11 E-Bikes to Buy Now” by Ryan Johnson in Culdesac & Ebikes. Did this essay pique your interest? This link is a great place to go next. Johnson owns over 70 electric bikes and has whittled his favourites down to eleven in the hope you can find one perfect for you.

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One thing to watch this week

This Vox explainer on the growing SUV trend was fascinating. It’s actually down to a loophole in gas mileage regulations, which classified pickups as commercial vehicles, opening the door for SUVs to sneak into that category, too. Recommended viewing.

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