I just read about Paul Freedman in Bicycle Times. He seems like the kind of person who would "get" the concept I'm trying to birth.
Backdrop: I'm from Wisconsin and live in the Chicago metro area now. I love to bicycle. Doing it in Winter around here sucks. Doing it on suburban collar county streets with these drivers is downright dangerous.
I'm also big on the environment with a staring on climate change and plastic-filled oceans.
I have kind of an inventive mind, and I started thinking about how I could ride my bike into the city without all the cars - a 35-50 mile ride depending on which suburb you're in.
We have a pretty decent commuter rail system here, with a lot of fairly-straight runs into the Loop. So I'm riding a Metra train into Chicago one morning, thinking "I wish I could be on my bike!"
With an hour to daydream, I started visualizing a nice, level elevated bike path over the train tracks, with ramps going up at various street crossings. It was a not-uncommon drizzly-grey day. So I pictured a clear plastic open-sided roof over the bikeway.
Then I thought, "what if I wanted breakfast and coffee about halfway in?" Hmm. A little restaurant perched on a side ledge up there alongside the bikeway. Bike racks, some flowers in flower boxes along the edge, tables and chairs...and roofed-over enough to be useable in most weather.
"What if I have a flat or break a spoke?" A little repair shop with an inner tube vending machine on the next ledge down the way.
What if I want to ride into one of the downtown areas of the suburbs along the way? The bikeway grew a branch going into the downtown of the next suburb, another restaurant along the side, another little shop with biking accessories a little further in.
By now, the bikeway was growing out over streets and neighborhoods, all pretty, clear plastic. The riding surface was made out of bamboo, like flooring at Ikea. It had solar panels embedded in parts of the roof and batteries in the support columns to supply lighting at night and for all the little restaurants and bike shops up there.
Skateboarders and scooters started sharing it, since it was as wide as the streets now, and there were no cars up there in the people-powered sky-bikeway network. Flowers and plants in planters were all along the sides.
There were corkscrew ramps, sloping ramps, elevators for wheelchairs being added on as the bikeway-in-the sky grew out over the sprawling metropolitan area. New pieces were being added all the time.
Pretty soon, there were wifi networks, potty stations, and active-transportation tourists from all over the world talking in twenty languages at the little elevated cafes and shops.
Winter was coming, and not much snow was falling on the streets below, so salt and plow trucks were running less, and the plow drivers were busy doing bikeway installation and repairs.
Landfills were being mined for plastic to make parts for the bikeway, and bamboo farmers were getting rich out West of us.
The oil companies didn't mind a bit when my train pulled into the station and my daydream ended. Neither did the weight-loss clinics and diet franchises, nor the diabetes doctors or knee-replacement surgeons. The aspirin-makers loved it when this vision stayed in my head as I started work and the bikeway poofed back into nothingness.
The open second story of the metropolis went back to letting rain and snow fall on the streets, and the tourists with their foreign accents and bicycles and other small, wheeled contraptions stayed home.
The plow and salt guys went back into tearing up the concrete and blacktop every year so we can spend billions on orange barrels and vests and street crews.
Someday, I'll have to paint a picture for everyone, and post it on the web, where dreams come alive.
Ride on,
Dan Stafford
http://1975continental.blogspot.com/
