Epilogue from How Indianapolis Built America
From "How Indianapolis Built America and How it will Rebuild it with the National Bicycle Greenway"
When I came to visit Indianapolis in 2017 to take a look at the work that Ray R Irvin had gushed about for the almost 2 decades I'd been calling him on the phone, I knew I had to be here. You see, after over two decades of little traction in California, once we determined a route from San Francisco to Washington DC, I felt called to move on. I spent the next five years in Ireland riding/researching their Great Western Greenway system.
There, the GWC had built itself into the government’s long and short range planning systems for various parts of the country and in the small towns through which it passed, it had brought a welcome change to the economy. The wet weather there, however showed me that if Greenways can transform an area where it's hard to be outside for long periods of time, no matter what time of year, the National Bicycle Greenway could easily turn the USA into a land of joy, wonder and awe.
So when my Irish wife asked me to move out, I knew I had to be in what was known as the Bike Capital of America, Davis California. It took me two years to figure out, however, that, while Davis had unmatched infrastructure, it was not infrastructure that connected to other cities or towns. In fact, Davis was like an island surrounded by roaring freeways and separated by many miles of farmland from other population centers.
When I came to what many people still think is the car racing capital of America, I was in for a surprise. For me, things began to resonate. Not only had I arrived at the top rated airport in North America, but when I started telling people that I had come to inspect Greenways, not one eye blinked. Unlike California, where people thought I had used the word freeway, people were aware of what I meant when I said the word Greenway. So propitious, so very refreshing!
It didn't take long for me to realize that Indianapolis, already an Anchor City on our route from San Francisco to Washington DC, needed to be the home of the National Bicycle Greenway. And that is why I not only moved here, but wrote this book. As the genuine Greenway Capital of the World, I needed for people to be privy to its trend-setting history, see a little bit of what it looks like here, and bring attention to the only downtown greenway in the world, the Indianapolis Cultural Trail: A Legacy of Gene & Marilyn Glick.
I need for people to see that Indianapolis, which has long had the self-esteem problem of not wanting to toot its horn, needs to be seen as the important player it long has been in building America. It needs to be seen as the genuine Gateway to the West that it really is. This will bring a plethora of travelers to this, the most central big city in America, to report back to their communities with the bicycle Greenway example we set here.
Toward that end, that is why I spent so much time talking about the Lewis and Clark Corp of Discovery, the first exploration of the lands west of the Mississippi River. I wanted to show that only a few of the explorers spent very little time in St. Louis where, to add insult to injury, they were also not welcome. I also went on in that chapter to show you why St. Louis does not deserve to be seen as the gateway city its civic leaders worked very hard back in the 60s to self describe itself as.
St. Louis is and always has been off the beaten path. Just as the transcontinental railroad bypassed it, the Lincoln Highway bypassed it, I-80 bypasses it and now our National Bicycle Greenway bypasses it, St. Louis needs to yield to Indianapolis’s Greenway example as being the real Gateway to the West.
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