NBG Virtual Tours
And how they will Build our Downtown Greenways
In what can be thought of as bicycle business loops, our Virtual Tours (all of which will take example from the Indianapolis Cultural Trail) will connect to all the places to eat, sleep, shop and play in our 20 Anchor Cities. In their final form, as Downtown Greenways, there will also be a healthy sampling of gardens, public art and attractive landscaping. Points of Interest such as cathedrals, museums, sporting venues and notable monuments will be everywhere to be found.
Before our landscape developers beautify them with the addition of art installations such as murals, water walls, art fences and fountains, etc., with the help of the local bike community, our NBG City Scouts will have done their work. They will have determined 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.
We feel that for each of our cities, to kick them off, the route, as well as the actual on the street data needed for an NBG Virtual Tour can be collected during our first summer of work in our cities. During this time, the scouts we will have put in place for this will ride the roads where the business attractions are as they collect information about these parts of the city. They will also learn all they can from the cyclist on the street.
The information they will then load into a form:
Business Type:
Restaurant | Pizzeria | Deli | Sandwich shop | Grocery | Convenience store | Liquor store | Hotel | Air BnB | Hostel | Mountain store | Bike shop | Hardware store | Coffee - Circle one
Address
Phone
Contact
Outdoor seating?
Accessibility by bike 1-10 (with 10 being the best)
# Employees who come by bike?
Bike Parking?
Bikes visible from inside?
Hours
Price range
Bikes allowed in hotel room?
It will be forwarded to the Virtual Tour Director for each city, As a member of our staff, this person will be in regular dialogue with the same vested interests our landscape developers will ultimately finalize their routes with. These groups are local Bike Activist organizations, the local Public Works, the Mayor’s Bike Advisory committee, if available, and Bike Co-Ops, if they exist.
Our Virtual Tour Director will then take all this information and, during the off-season, work with our cartographers to get it plugged into the Point of Interest map for each NBG city. HERE, for example, is Indianapolis. It is best viewed on a laptop until we can get all of the (points of interest) icons to run as separate lists on all smartphones.
Once mapped out to connect the stops we have designated, this will cause improvements and enhancements to our route to be suggested as it gets used. Such information will be added to the comment section that associates with our maps. We foresee our virtual tours running in this way for a period of 2 to 3 years.
Even before they become Downtown Greenways in all 19 of our other NBG Anchor Cities, our Virtual Tours will revitalize downtowns. As they show people safe ways they can move about, they will bring business back that retail centers have lost to online shopping. Because our Virtual Tours will also make it fun to join other cyclists, people will start coming back to the eating establishments and other businesses that support all the various other sellers of goods. Because of our Virtual Tours, downtowns will be on their way to becoming happy places not dominated by the car.
In matching the popular places people go on a bicycle to eat, sleep, shop, play, and sightsee with the best way to pedal across our NBG Anchor Cities, we will keep the big picture in mind. While the endpoints of our Virtual Tours will connect to our route across the nation, in the cities themselves, often this will involve connecting business districts to one another.
Since most neighborhoods have little pockets of business establishments frequented by their local cyclists, our work will have the effect of connecting different communities to one another. In doing so, we will make use of existing bicycle infrastructure. As our routes run from neighborhood to neighborhood, there will be rough patches that need attention. Until the upgrades needed are put in place, our Virtual Tours will route our riders around sticking points until they are corrected. It is this that our Downtown Greenways will remediate.
HERE, for example, is the Virtual Tour we did for Reno, NV. Built in 2015 on a shoestring budget and in a massively constricted timeframe of only two weeks, THIS is the general idea of what we have in mind for our Virtual Tours. All of the rhetoric you see there will become the routing you will see at our Point Of Interest maps similar to how we plotted Indianapolis per this link.