NBG Blueprint: Interconnecting America with a Network of Coast to Coast Bicycle Villages

This book begins with an overview of our bike route across America. It goes on to explain the importance of the Anchor Cities that hold our coast-to-coast connection together. Within that line of thinking, you will also learn the many reasons why Anchor Cities are needed to make the NBG financially feasible.

Because few resources and even fewer people will feel called to our vision, unless it can generate notable revenue, here are the main money generating programs that Anchor Cities will spawn:

NBG Membership/Downtown Lodging discounts
Points of Interest Maps (POI)
Biking Report Cards

In terms of jumpstarting this effort, we will show you how we will use the seed money we will have solicited to overcome the largest impediment to cycle tourism in our cities, the cost of lodging. You will see how the prospect of inexpensive downtown lodging will then cause NBG membership to skyrocket. We feel that with membership revenues and the other fundraising programs we foresee that we can significantly offset the cost of overnight accommodations for our members. Soon, we hope that our cyclists will be able to enjoy luxury room nights at hostel and budget hotel prices.

As we reduce the cost of overnight accommodations for our cyclists, we are also benefited in other ways. Whether on a long tour or coming in for the day from the next city, all cyclists are limited by the light. By being able to stay the night affordably, they can spend the money they save with local purveyors of food and entertainment, especially those that support us with discounts of their own.

Another very important reason for our Anchor Cities is that they serve as placeholders for another revenue engine that will fuel the NBG - our Points Of Interest (POI) locations. Merchants who want to stand out and/or be set apart with photos and descriptions of their offerings will become a revenue source for us.

To help us here, as just one of the many ways in which their service will be indispensable to us, seed money will also be used to contract with a top tier PR firm. The PR firm we contract will create strategically placed news releases, interviews and information about our organization and its plans. Because of the buzz this will engender, many businesses will already be familiar with us before we make contact. This will make the job of selling them into our programs much easier.

Coming back to our POI, they will be located initially on the Virtual Tours we will have built that access them. As templates, for our Downtown Greenways, they will run from one side of the city (in not necessarily the most direct route) to the other and connect at either end to our cross country alignment. In this book, you will also see the only working Downtown Greenway in the world, the standard bearer for what we plan to replicate in all 19 of our other main population centers - the Indianapolis Cultural Trail (ICT).

In the words ahead, you will see how landscape developers will help us turn the bikeway connections our Virtual Tours help us develop into tourist attractions that celebrate the unique character of each our cities. The computer renderings and/or physical models they provide will help us get their work underwritten. In essence, we will be enlarging the scope of what Sasaki & Assoc. did to overhaul much of Indianapolis.

We will show how the Indianapolis Cultural Trail has not only revitalized a dying Rust Belt center of commerce, but brought about powerful development in the rest of the city, region and state. As it has, it has also raised the profile of the cyclist.

The writing here will also describe another revenue generator that our Anchor Cities will also make possible - our Anchor City Biking Report Cards. These will communicate what these cities look like from a cyclist’s perspective. They will also stand out as widely circulated documents that the media and travel publications will refer to. They will also generate notable advertising funds.