The Big Picture
The last weekend in April in San Francisco, will be all about bicycles and the National Bicycle Greenway (NBG). It all begins when the 15-person Busycle (see the short video!) helps to kick off the monthly Critical Mass ride that leaves from Justin Herman Plaza located near the ferry building and Bay Bridge on San Francisco’s storybook waterfront. The following day will find “Awake Again” Author and National Bicycle Greenway director, Martin Krieg, signing Print on Demand copies of his new book, “How America Can Bike and Grow Rich, The National Bicycle Greenway Manifesto” (HBGR), at an as yet unnamed book store also in the city. Excerpts from HBGR, including city histories and the Biking Report Cards the NBG has drawn up for each Mayors' Ride city can be found now at the new

that his organizaton will also be using this trip to call attention to. Krieg wil be using using his booksignings, dialogue with reporters and the people he and his small team meet along the way to explain HBGR, his Vision Statement for an interconnected two-wheel America

Sunday will find the thought provoking Busycle in use again as dozens of Golden Gate Park, Car Free Sunday goers get a chance to enjoy this amazing machine during the several hours worth of demonstration rides that will take place on that day. On Monday after a short round of Busycle rides at City Hall and then receiving the 2009 San Francisco NBG Day proclamation from Mayor Newsom and/or his staff, Krieg will point the handlebars of his 19th Century HiWheel bicycle east as he then begins shepherding the Boston based Busycle back to Beantown. This year’s 7th Annual National Mayors' Ride will be supported by the kind of bio diesel bus that runs on the vegetable oil waste regularly discarded in restaurants. It will be used to tow the Busycle to the 28 different NBG Day cities that are part of the San Francisco to Boston Greenway connection that the NBG foresees.

A Closer Look:
When Krieg and his team (tba) land at each new Mayors' Ride City Hall for NBG Day, and complete the brief proclamation ceremonies that result, the Busycle will then be made available to the public for short demonstration rides. This, of course, after the Mayor and his or her staff as well as the press have had their opportunity to enjoy the short Busycle ride especially scheduled for them. While several nights a week during the tour, evenings will find our machine available to the public for rides for an hour before Krieg speaks at the bike shops, book stores or meeting halls, etc. that host his book signing events.

To make sure these events are well attended, the tour’s on board press agent will have used the bus’s sophisticated phone, fax, and computer lines to build interest from the local media and bike and environmental organizations. To keep the Nation’s news agencies curious, especially when Krieg is busy pedaling his slow moving antique bicycle between NBG Day cities, the group’s traveling publicist will make use of a plethora of exciting and fresh material.

Besides the tour’s press kit (including 5x7 glossies of the team with the buses), our news fabricator will also have audio and visual material he or she will be using. There will be the podcast interviews Krieg will have conducted with Mayors, city officials and those interesting locals he will have exchanged with along the way. These will be made available for the internet by the NBG home office.

The scouts who will be busy collecting information for the more in depth bicycle profiles we will be doing for each Mayors' Ride city, will also have captured a treasure trove of images that can be used for promotional material in news releases and the like. As they isolate the bad as well as the good for our interactive maps, these bike conditions investigators will also be raising the volume of our message as they report on the exchanges that result with the people of the lands through which they move. A newspaper syndication will regularly feature these stories and they will also be read by the mailing lists that our scouts will also be adding contacts to as they go forward. So that their reports have maximum impact, care will be taken to make certain that a skilled wordsmith is chosen who can take their road diaries and turn them into lively accounts that sum up the tour’s efforts to date.

As for the duties of the scouts, in their work, they will not only take pictures of exemplary bicycle infrastructure but will also document trouble areas as they come across them. For both, they will do so with actual images for the map coordinates that they will be loading to our maps so that a very bright light will shine on such problem areas.

The Tour’s webmaster will also help keep the publicity current as the ride progresses with daily updates to the online photo gallery/slide show. This web publisher will also be acting as a publicist when he or she loads the podcasts and written reports to the RSS feed that keeps news about the tour in real time.

All of the ingredients are in place to insure that this will be a well oiled machine. All of the Tour’s rider/scouts have extensive cycling experience as you will soon see in the bios they will be registering with us.

NBG Director, Martin Krieg, has pedaled across the nation twice. The 1986 ride he did for the National Head Head Injury Foundation reached 40 million people for the cause of head Injury in and amongst his public speaking and TV and radio appearances. For seven years, until 1994, his company Cycle America, published many tens of thousands of bicycle guides of which the theme was the National Bicycle Greenway (NBG) and long distance bike touring.

The nonprofit organization that became official in 1989, the National Bicycle Greenway, has, since that time, launched and celebrated, many with festivals, seven coast to coast bike crossings. The NBG has also produced five successful coast to coast Mayors' Ride campaigns and not only has Krieg written the book “How to Bike America”, but he has also personally inspired, coached and consulted on over a dozen other successful transcontinental bikes rides.