NBG Downtown Greenways
In all 20 of our NBG Anchor Cities
Each of our 19 other NBG Anchor Cities, will be made to stand out by its very own Downtown Greenway. A traffic disentwined bikeway, across the urban centers we have selected, each city’s Downtown Greenway will have access points to the eastward and westward connections to our bike route from San Francisco to Washington, DC. As they establish the unique character found in each of our Anchor Cites, they will be patterned after the 10-mile long, Indianapolis Cultural Trail that has no equal anywhere here on planet Earth.
In order to form each city’s Downtown Greenway, they will have begun as the Virtual Tours we talked about in the previous chapter. As we showed you, with the help of the local bike community, our NBG City Scouts will determine what these routes are. They will designate the most popular places cyclists go to have their needs taken care of, along with the points of interest worthy of a visit that are no more than half a mile from these locations (the food, drink and lodging). At which point, a route will be devised that connects all of them.
As virtual tours, they will begin as suggested ways to travel through the city in question on a bike. Once mapped out to connect the stops we have designated, this will establish a route and cause improvements and enhancements to it to be suggested as it gets used. We foresee our Virtual Tours, as we said, above, running in this way for a period of 2 to 3 years.
As the PR Firm we will have contracted with bombards the Americans psyche with visions of cyclists rolling along on Downtown Greenways, what the Virtual Tours will become, before they are actually built, the public will feel called to make suggestions of their own. For each of our Anchor Cities, our PR Firm will create contests to bring these possibilities forward. There will be public workshops where these designs, everything from simple sketches, diagrams and drawings to blue prints and scale models, etc., will all be aired. This will also solicit the interest of art schools and college art programs.
Figuratively speaking, lines will form made up of artists trying to get what they propose accepted. This is so because they will know whoever gets this work will have a very high credential they can point to. The winning designs will serve as exciting idea food our developers will be required to build their proposals around.
When the public finally votes on its chosen design(s), they will feel like they have been made a part of the process. In time, once it is complete, they will feel that the Downtown Greenway running through their city is their own. This as the ultimate result will fill the hearts of all those of all ages who ultimately get to experience the adult playgrounds our landscape developers will have devised.
In order to help us get their work funded, we will be asking landscape developers for full-fledged proposals that best represent what the public has suggested. Toward that end, they will offer us 3-D models, Power Points and/or slideshow representations, etc., of all of the different possibilities they foresee. From these proposals, we will select one design firm.
Nor is their job done there. We will ask them to work with our publicist to sell their offerings to the public. Through community meetings and other means, the landscape design firms we will have selected will professionally and convincingly, present the possibilities for each section.
This as they show all the possibilities they foresee. These can include everything from protected and/or separated bike lanes, to selectively placed gardens, fountains, water walls, bike present signage alerts, drinking fountains, kiosks, benches, signal timing adjustments, road striping, history placards, etc. and items specific to each area such as bike tunnels and overpasses, etc.
As this picture is being painted, a member of our staff will be on hand to help the businesses along the way see the bigger picture of the National Bicycle Greenway that they will be a part of. He or she will communicate the vision of connectivity, economic development, health and fitness, quality of life and how we will, in time, be connecting our coast-to-coast alignment to destinations for recreation, history, education, wildlife and adventure as well as for internet and infrastructure possibilities.
In some of the word above, we talk about how Indianapolis built the first and only downtown Greenway in the world, the Indianapolis Cultural Trail (ICT). A dying rust belt city, led by the work of Sasaki Design, as augmented by Mr Greenway himself, Ray Irvin, Kevin Osburn, of Rundell Ernstberger Associates, and Jim Lingenfelter, of Five2Five Design Studio LLC, the Indy 500 city is now known as the Greenway Capital of the Planet.
As the cornerstones for our Greenway from one Coast to the other, Downtown Greenways will make all of our Anchor Cities attractive cycling destinations. Just like Indianapolis, now has the most bike friendly downtown in the USA, we can reinvent the rest of America with a network of Downtown Greenways!