Being a bicycle-friendly city is about so much more than bike lanes and car-free spaces (though those are crucially important too) — it’s about people choosing biking and rolling as an easy, convenient, and joyful mode of transportation, and shifting away from car dependency. But in order to bike and roll, you have to know how! That’s where our bicycle education program comes in, and for the last few decades we’ve taught thousands of people to ride.
2025 was another great year for our Bicycle Education (Bike Ed) programming! Thanks to our work with the SFMTA, MTC, and Lyft, we held 119 bicycle education events in 2025. Across those events, we taught 1,527 San Franciscans of all experience levels how to safely and confidently bicycle in our city, and reached 4,622 people through our outreach events.
Equitable access is at the core of our mission, and that principle governs our free bicycle education program. We work hard to make sure that we’re doing outreach across the entire city, and our participants come from every demographic. In 2025, through self-identified race and ethnicity data collected by our post-course surveys, we know that 19% of our course participants identify as East Asian and 11% identify as Latino/x, while 20% identify as South or Southeast Asian and 6% are Black or African American. 34% of our course attendees identified as white or caucasian. We know more than anyone that there’s a perception that cycling historically exclusive activity, and has caused real structural harm in Black and brown communities across San Francisco, so having 66% of our class participants identifying as non-white is a crucial milestone in moving towards a more inclusive future for biking and rolling, where people of every race and ethnicity feel a sense of belonging and ownership in this movement.
We also know that a sense of belonging extends past race and ethnicity, and that bicycles and cycling culture have historically skewed towards men — safety, and women’s perceptions of safety, influences the gender gap of cycling which has real ramifications on how we grow this movement. But free bicycle education programs like ours are a crucial tool in combatting that gender gap, and in 2025 we’re proud that 60% of our class participants identified as women and 4% identified as trans or non-binary.
We’re really proud that we’ve taught San Franciscans of every age to ride. Of course, one of our most popular and beloved programs is Freedom From Training Wheels, which teaches children ages 2 to 5 how to start riding confidently without training wheels, with instructors fitting them to a balance or pedal bikes and helmets. But through our Learn to Ride, On Bike Practice and Smart City Cycling series, we’ve taught students aged 14 to 81, and even a few older than that, proving that it’s never too late to learn. One of our instructors, Chester Hartsough, remembers an eighty year old student last summer who he described as determined, persistent, and resilient. “The day started out rough for her,” he said, “and she even had one small fall but got right back up and on her bike.” By the end of his class, she was riding around as well as any of the other students who were young enough to be her great-grandchildren.
The work we do continues to resonate well after the class has ended. The most impactful numbers we saw in 2025 were from our 6-week post-course surveys, sent to all participants in our classes. We’re looking to see how the skills and confidence they’ve gained are helping them feel comfortable with biking and rolling as a transportation option available to them, as well as confidence in the rules of the road and the safest ways to get around the city.
Six weeks after taking our class, we’re heartened to consistently find that 96% of our participants are biking the same or more than before our class — we know that biking for everyday transportation is a habit so it’s rewarding to know that we’re helping build that habit! Even better, 87% of our participants report that they’re biking more confidently, particularly when they take advantage of traffic-calmed and car-free spaces across the city. And confident biking and rolling is all about knowing the rules of the road; 29% rate the knowledge they acquired in class as “excellent” or “good.”
As spring rolls around and 2026 warms up, our bicycle education classes are getting posted to our events calendar, including our scooter education classes. You can sign up for our monthly Bike Ed newsletter to get updates on our class schedule; even if you already feel confident navigating the city via bike, we’d love you to share the newsletter link with your bike-curious friends and neighbors!
The majority of our free bicycle education is sponsored by the SFMTA/SFCTA, and our classes that focus on Bay Wheels and the bike share system are also made possible by MTC and Lyft.
