As the first complete National Bicycle Greenway Anchor City, we hope with “How Indianapolis Built America and How it will Rebuild it with the National Bicycle Greenway”   you were able to see why we made Indianapolis the center of the National Bicycle Greenway. Along the way, I also hope you became aware that Greenways are a part of the government road planning process here. Any new road construction must build new or old Greenway alignments into their equations. As such, I will be using this book to show you how we plan to go about keying off of many of the great Greenway examples Indianapolis has set to make the rest of the NBG real.

To set the table, I will begin by showing you how many parts of our route were forged by the early settlers of this country. And why they traveled slightly north to connect the coasts. You will also see that half of this country is made up of empty lands. And that its largest concentration of people has its center around the most central big city in America, the Crossroads of America, Indianapolis.

We will next talk about the 20 population centers along our route, the ones that hold it together –  

San Francisco | San Jose | Palo Alto | Santa Cruz | Oakland | Napa | Davis | Sacramento | Reno | Salt Lake CIty | Boulder | Denver | Omaha | Des Moines | Chicago | Indianapolis | Cincinnati | Columbus | Pittsburgh | Washington, DC

You will not only learn about them but you will also be made aware of the strides they are taking to make their cycling safer and more enjoyable. As such, you will see how the Biking Report Cards we plan for them will become a revenue stream for us and give them the planning tool they need to help them become increasingly attractive destinations for cyclists.

Very importantly, we will once again talk about the NBG Anchor City that got the Greenway ball rolling, Indianapolis. You will learn about the precedent this city long has set as a transportation leader. It is here that at the next level of the evolution of transit, you will learn about Indy Greenways and the only Downtown Greenway in the world, the Indianapolis Cultural Trail (ICT). It is the ICT that our plan here endeavors to pattern its Downtown Greenways after.

Because of the importance the ICT has had on not only Indianapolis, but the region and the state, as it stimulates the building of other Greenways that connect to it, we will go into more depth about the Cultural Trail. As what can be thought of as the central heart and soul of our coast-to-coast Greenway network, ours will be a route that connects Downtown Greenways similar to the ICT to one another. Toward that end, we will once again dedicate a whole chapter to the world class Downtown Greenway the only one of its kind – the Indianapolis Cultural Trail. 

In order to replicate the magic the ICT has genuinely brought about, in order to create Downtown Greenways in the rest of our Anchor Cities, we will begin by building Virtual Tours in each of them. As bicycle business loops, they will take cyclists to all the places they eat, sleep, shop, play and visit in these population centers. We call these destinations POIs (Points Of Interest).  

It will be the route we devise that safely connects these POI  to one another that we will call our Virtual Tour for that city. It is this that will, in time, be perfected with the landscaping, pathways, signage, intersection grading and light metering, etc. of the ICT. Where the National Bicycle Greenway is concerned, the endpoints of these Virtual Tours will all connect to our Transamerica route on either side.

To get to the starting line, there is, of course, the question of money. We feel that we can monetize the almost 30 years we have been online with the National Bicycle Greenway message at BikeRoute.com. Over 1000 pages, getting the site configured with display advertising should be a way  to generate enough funding to be able to hire the Membership Director we will talk about in our fund raising chapter. 

In addition to new member fees, you will see how this director will also develop a large revenue stream from the corporations that will be in line to join us. It will be the infusion of dollars from web monetization and membership that will not only help us staff our Virtual Tour campaigns but underwrite all the many campaigns and programs we will talk about in Book 2:

Marking our Coast-to-Coast route | Route signage sales persons | History placards on route w/sponsorship sales  | Online Map Points of interest (POI) salespersons | NBG Main Office & Indy Hub | TransAm Rider Blog | Administer Coast-to-Coast rides on our route | Anchor Cities online sales and site maintenance | Sleeping Centers | Fundraising Campaign | National Mayors’ Ride Festival/Gateway Fest at the National Bike Capital | Mayors’ Ride Coordinator | Mayors’ Ride proclamationist | NBG Scout/Ambassador Coordinator | NBG passport | NBG Hubs 

Besides showing you the importance of NBG membership, the chapter we write about it will also show you how having this book out there will incentivize people to join our organization. They will see what their money is buying, that there is a plan in place. Toward that end, we will tell you that we want to have 200,000 members by 2026.

We will use the words in that part of the book  to show you the importance of numbers. Being able to represent ourselves as a large organization will give our vision added leverage in the eyes of the media, corporate checkbooks and the government approval process, etc. With that as our motivation, we will show you how we plan to sell memberships at a low enough price to engage the support of a wide cross-section of cyclists and non-cyclists.

Working the POI that our Virtual Tour programs will have identified next, our money generating capacity will grow even larger. It is here that we foresee a large sales force helping POI merchants increase their online map exposure. For this, a notable amount of money will change hands. All toward the end of underwriting the many programs I touched on above and that will be fleshed out in Book 2.

Even before our membership campaign and Virtual Tour building make our Points Of Interest campaign possible, the National Bicycle Greenway will be much talked about. Once our POI operation is humming along at full throttle, the NBG will frame the national conversation. Americans will become preoccupied with quality of life issues. How to make it easier to get to school, work or play; how to make our thoroughfares more beautiful natural and quiet; how to honor our ancestors and our past; how to make our merchants accessible to our own two feet, how and what to eat so that the exercise of our bike pedaling efforts is enhanced, etc, will become the questions we seek answers for, the dominant paradigm that rules our lives. This instead of how we can protect ourselves from all the dangers that seem to be growing with an alarming degree of frequency. 

Because we are magnetic to that which we think about the most, the NBG we foresee will inspire Americans to think healthy, to think BIG, to think about what they want and not what they don’t want.

And all of this will be before we move on to the next level of National Bicycle Greenway actualization that I will be detailing in NBG Blueprint Book 2!