Mayors' Ride Survivor TV Series
from "How America Can Bike and Grow Rich, the National Bicycle Greenway in Action"
Once our PR Firm establishes interest in the rides people are doing to our Anchor Cities, it will engage the interest of a screenwriter(s) who will turn bike trips across America on our route into a weekly television show on a par with the Survivor series. Here we can even resurrect our annual national Mayors' Rides. They are a perfect forum for such a television broadcast. Here for example is the piece I wrote for my book, “How America Can Bike and Grow Rich”.
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Later in the afternoon, another round of Busycle rides was held at the nearby, stunning Millennium Hotel. There, almost a hundred more people joined in the fun as Queen City Bike, an organization committed to making Cincinnati as bike friendly as possible, let their membership know. The laughter was non-stop before another NBG Day came to an end.
As we gave our last demonstration ride, several of the people who had climbed aboard were talking about their wanting to get home so they could catch the latest episode of Survivor. According to them, it was supposed to come on right after a pro football game that was supposed to be ending pretty soon. Even though none of us were regular TV watchers, this was one show all of us were familiar with.
As soon as we got back out to our bikes, Skot remarked, “Those Survivor guys ‘otta be watching our ride on their TV sets.”
“Yea, I was kinda thinking the same thing,” Don added. “I watched that show one time. Seemed kind of silly for them to create these fake movie sets in those far away places when there’s all kinds of people doing adventure all around us. Guess it just would be a lot harder for them to package it for a TV Show.”
“Hey, we make the nightly news after most of our Mayor’s receptions and people always seem interested in what we’re doing. I mean we’re colorful with all these different bikes. And look at us. It looks like we came in from the jungle as we meet with all these people who come out of climate controlled cars and buildings. I wonder if we really can make our annual Mayors’ Ride into one of them reality TV shows?” I asked.
“We could begin by showing these guys going to a bike shop and getting the application for the Mayors' Ride. And they could be talking about which relay legs they hope they get picked for,” Virginia offered.
“Yeah, well I’ll tell ya, every time I get new riders to join me I gotta hold their hand when they fill out your application form,” Skot began. “You’d laugh if you saw how they wanted to answer some of your questions. The Paschal must know what you want to hear because you always pick my guys. We could have this big build up with dese guys filling out questionnaires to see if they get picked.”
“I don’t know, I think a good picture helps. I was at the NBG office one time when they had this one applicant putting his bike in the back of a Humvee. I don’t think he got picked,” Don said.
“Yeah we could do a scene where they go out and do practice shots and talk about which picture they should send in or something,” Bill added as he used his bungee cords to tie a loaf of bread on to the top of the small load he was carrying.
“I think a cool scene would be for them to go into a library to print out a new map from our on-line map interface,” Virginia suggested. “And then..”
“Hey wait a sec, what’s supposed to be wrong with their old one?” Skot interrupted.
“Oh, we’d have to have a scene where it fell in the campfire the night before.” I volunteered, “or it got all sticky and stained from eating the blackberries they picked from the bushes along the roadside. We could come up with something. But no, we
could have them going over the route they want to take as one of them jokes about the days not so very long ago where they had to ask car drivers what the roads they wanted to use were like. We could have them marveling at how all the roads at our site are now specced out for cyclists with traffic volumes and hill profiles and shoulder conditions. It’d be really great if we could figure out some way to plug at least some of the advertisers they’d be seeing on the map banners too.”
“They wouldn’t do that on reality TV. Then it’s not real. From what I’ve seen you have to wait until the commercial until they remind you that the story you are watching is a promotion for advertisers,” Don said.
Busy trying to get my trail mix to fit in one bag, I rolled my eyes as a couple of noisy motorcycle engines fired up. “Man is nothing sacred to those guys? I thought when I got out of Santa Cruz I was done listening to them. But they love terrorizing nice places, I mean what’s wrong with quiet?”
I could see that everyone agreed with me when Bill kept our TV fantasy alive, “I think the mornings are important to show. If the camera crew is awake enough, they can show us getting up and out of our tents and slogging through our morning chores of getting the little village we made the night before broken down, and oh yeah, we should show how we set up camp too. But I’ve always thought it would be funny to see what I look like when I’m half awake and scrunching things up so they’ll fit on my bike again. We could even show the delegation of duties. You know one of us could be getting the water for oatmeal, one of us could be firing up the stove and one of us could be studying the maps. And on NBG Day we could show the meeting we have right before we leave where we talk about the towns we gotta hit and when we gotta hit em so we are not late in the big cities.”
“Hmmm, maybe on NBG Day they could interview some of the younger riders so they can show what they are going through before they are in the spotlight and all the TV cameras and reporters want to know about them and their ride. I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard to show the nervousness some of them experience before meeting the Mayors,” Don said with a smile in his voice.
“Heck if we’re gonna show detail like that, we should also show them passing out their NBG business cards. And we could have them talking about the NBG when they visit certain stores and stuff. We could even have them stop and tour an advertiser of ours,” I said, always keeping in mind how we could support our sponsors to get such a possibility paid for.
On a roll, I kept introducing new possibilities from the business plan I had spent many years writing. “You know how they shift scenes in movies and stuff, we could even bring the NBG Hubs into this. We could show how everyone at the NBG Hub each Mayors’ Ride city has is going around cleaning up and getting their operation ready for our visit. And then we could tour each Hub’s bike museum and visit them when they are getting their meeting hall ready for some kind of community event they are hosting there that night.”
“Didn’t I see that you wanted to hold the Mayor’s press conferences at the Hubs? Why don’t we hold the one for each city’s NBG Day there and film that?” Don offered.
“That’s only gonna happen if they have something else going on at City Hall. We do our NBG Days at City Halls to give them a sense of place; to associate them with the symbolic center of the city.”
“Good point but hey if we’re gonna cover more than just the NBG Day reception, since the cities know they are going to be on TV, we could show how they are making the routes we’ll be on look all pretty before we get to City Hall. We could have one of the photographer guys go ahead of us by a few weeks or months and catch some of these city workers in action while they are restriping a bike lane or something, That should be pretty easy to coordinate with their Public Works department,” Don said as he scratched his head. “How ‘bout filming them filling a pot hole or fixing a traffic light sensor?”
“Whoaa,” I began, “if we’re gonna go that far, if we can get one of the Mayor’s offices to cooperate, why don’t we see if they’ll let us talk to their staff. The TV guys can interview them and ask them what all they are doing to get ready. We can show the Mayor’s staff alerting their contacts at the newspapers and TV stations and going through the checklist we send them. Besides the basic stuff of making sure they have a digital camera and podium there, we could show them talking about how involved they want to get. Whether they want to do a police escort for us. Which organizations they are going to invite to speak and for how long. Whether they are going to have storyboards to talk about the bike projects they are working on. We could even show them worrying if the riders are going to be on time or if they’ll find the staging area they are supposed to be meeting everyone at for the couple blocks long ride into City Hall. In a perfect world, we could do one of the cities where the Mayor rides in with us.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Skot called out. “Why don’t we get ‘em to film us as we queue up for our ride from dem parks they have us wait at until those news guys and the Mayor are all ready at City Hall. Sometimes we’re there for a long time. You know we could be talking to dem bike cops that are gonna give us a police escort while we’re waiting. They could like listen in on our group leader when he’s talking to the Mayor’s staff on his cell phone. Come to think of it, wouldn’t it be wild if we had a woman ride leader?”
“What do you mean,” Virginia teased, “I thought I was your leader. “
“No offense,” Bill began “but we’re lucky if we get women on any of these relays. But I’ll tell ya what I like about these Mayors' Rides,” Bill continued, pausing for a moment to make sure everyone was listening. “I really think it would be great if they could film of us going past those banners that welcome us.”
“You mean ones that say this city or that city NBG Day, the ones that that hang on lamp posts?” Don asked.
“Hmmm, how about bus stops that read, ‘We support the National Bicycle Greenway”. And hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we could get our message on to the side of a few trains?” I offered.
“You mean like those railroad cars that are painted all gawdy like for Walmart or something? I don’t think so,” said Skot.
“They don’t have to be all these bright colors and busy looking,” I began, “we could be classy. We could paint each car different. One could be cyclists riding by a mountain lake with the words ‘National Bicycle Greenway’ tastefully inscribed in the corners. We could have ‘em riding in a city scene in another. And maybe across a bike bridge like that suspension Bike Bridge they just built over the Missouri River in Omaha...”
100 miles more to Columbus, Ohio...