After a worthy morning of phone scheduling meetings for today, I finally had the presence of mind to actually call Reno Bike Project, Executive Director, Noah Chubb-Silverman. As you have seen, I had been in three times getting repair work done and each time I had not seen him around. He said we could meet today if I got over in the next half hour.

I got dressed and ready for the day. I walked over to my bike. The tire was flat!! The only surprise this time around was the tire. It was the harder to change back one.

I got out the floor plump I had stuck in the bike box and got the tire nice and hard. I only needed it to hold air for ten minutes. And just for insurance, I zipped it into my pannier with the handle and its shaft sticking way out.

When I soon got there I was finally able to ask the grand leader himself about the RBP operation.

He took me back into  what they call the Burn Ward. Here is what we talked abut in the short video below:

Then I ran a short video of the public work stations in use:

Soon I spotted Dean Magnuson and talked to him and Noah about his role as greeter:

 

Noah had to dash off to his meeting and I got to work patching my back tube. I also outfitted the rear one with the other half of the tire liner set I had race walked to buy on Sunday.

Next I took a look at the sign on this building right next to the river that I have passed every day while here in Reno. Sometimes three or four times a day. Seems I have been more interested in the original Reno Arch that is very close to it to notice that it is the National Automobile Museum. Or in my being car-free since 1989,  was it more a matter of just seeing what I wanted to see?

Well, I forced myself to go all the way around this single story, long, long building to its entrance. And I was glad I did. I didn’t pay the ten dollars to go in to see the 225 cars they have on exhibit, but I did learn a bit about the important man from whose collection all this originated.

When Bill Harrah, the man who built the 925-room hotel that has blessed me with this opportunity to learn about Reno, died in in 1978, it was his 175 vintage, pre-WWII cars that filled the 100,000 square feet of exhibition space that had been built in 1989 to house them.

Then I rode over to nearby Laughing Planet to meet with Tim Healion. He and I had spoken on the phone earlier. As the former owner of the now deceased Deux Gros Nez coffee shop here, Tim is the man who also brought bike racing to this town:

Here is why he is so excited about now being a part of  a growing restaurant chain that has its origin in Portland, Or.

After Tim and I wrapped up, I explored more of what is called the mid-town part of Reno, where he has his business. Located about eight blocks up Virginia Street from Harrahs, I found Bibbos Coffee. It had been recommended to me by local cyclists as a worthy stop. 

Also on California Street I noticed a lot of other cool looking restaurants. This one has what I think is a bar that opens up right on the sidewalk.

I was also getting excited about the generous bike lane on California until it ended in a trafficky mess on the other side of a hill at less than a mile’s worth of pedaling. The mess I encountered was the same as the one from the day before when I rode Mayberry and ended up  with a bike lane that also ended on a very fast Keystone. And yet as Joe Harrington the PIO for the Regional Transportation Commission (RTC) would explain to me in the meeting I will soon be talking about, this trouble spot is high up on their radar with interim fixes hopefully within a year. And the RTC has been in dialogue with the local neighborhoods about what can be done.

Earlier in the day, the non full-time Reno Bike Coordinator, Rebecca Kapular, had invited me to come to a public Bike Share open house as they were exploring the possibility of bringing a Bike Sharing program to Reno.

As such, I got to visit and meet with some extremely talented people besides Rebecca and Joe. One of the consultants  the city had hired to help with their feasibility study, for example was Alexandra Sweet, pictured below.She lives in the the Mission in San Francisco and works at Alta Planing  in Oakland

Both herself and Cynthia Albright, a planning manager for Stantec, agreed with me that the RTC people were very enthusiastic about making Reno better for cycling. They also told me they were fun to work with.

Another happy smiling person that was there busy talking notes was Jen Simmons. She was a reporter for the Daily Sparks Tribune and told me she loved writing about bicycle stuff the most.

So much positive energy for bicycling in Reno!!