NBG Virtual Tours
With Timeline for building, NBG Scouts and the data they will collect
Virtual Tours
NBG Virtual Tours
HERE IS A PROPOSED TIMELINE
Done as Eastern, California and Old West Tiers
For 10/23 - 10/33
In what can be thought of as bicycle business routes, our Virtual Tours (all of which will take example from the Indianapolis Cultural Trail) will connect to most of the places cyclists 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 with the addition of art installations such as murals, water walls, art fences and fountains, etc.,. Points of Interest such as cathedrals, museums, sporting venues and notable monuments will be everywhere to be found.
Before our landscape developers beautify the public input they will have received, the right of way will have been suggested by our NBG City Scouts* and signed off on by all the vested interests and the local bike community as we show below. To get this ball rolling, the Scouts will determine 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, the greatest preponderance of these stops will appear on the main trunk line across the city that we propose. Connecting routes will also be the devised that bring businesses in other parts of the city to our main line.
We feel that for each of our cities, to make them real, 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.
As for the businesses themselves, here is 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?
The scout’s work will be forwarded to the Virtual Tour Director for each city, As a member of our staff, this person will identify all of the vested interests along our proposed right of way. Besides the property owners, these groups will include local Bike Activist organizations, the local Public Works, the Mayor’s Bike Advisory committee, if available, and Bike Co-Ops, if they exist.
For those who control land, outside of the government, most all of their objections will be met by the fact sheet we will have sent to them. Concerns such as property value, crime, vagrancy, etc., will all be addressed in question and answer form. The source for this information will track back to the university studies that the Indiana Greenways organization has on file. Any additional concerns will be mitigated by the fund we will have set aside for road blocks.
Once we have reached agreement with the property owners, and the bike groups have all approved our route, 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 on the same page as the maps 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, on the local level, 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, where possible, to bring them to our main line. As our routes bring neighborhood to our right of way, there will be rough patches that need attention. Until the upgrades required are put in place, our we will route our riders around sticking points until they are corrected.
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 as we showed you above.
*NBG City Scout Job Description:
In terms of who our NBG City Scouts are and how we will hire them, we will begin accepting applications in the fall, six months before our campaign is set to begin in each of our cities. We will be looking for cyclists who regularly ride in the city in question and are well versed in their own neighborhood pockets.
A 6-month position, this person will have good communication skills and be able to interface with everyone from the bike messenger and bike shop mechanic to the spandex racer and office worker. Ideally, they will be able to write clear and concise reports.
For three months, in the summertime, they will live in and base their efforts from the participating hotel we will have contracted with. During this time, they will Car Free explore all of the neighborhood pockets in the city. The roads they use to get from one pocket to another will also be tracked by them and passed along to our cartographer.
In addition, as our City Scouts track the routing from the hotel they're staying at to pre-specified dining establishments and other points of interest, this information will also be passed along to our cartographer. Toward this end, in addition to collecting routing information for our Downtown Greenways, this will allow us to feature the routes to specific lodging purveyors as an additional form of revenue for us.