1) Miniature roadside attractions
Inspired by the mini-houses at bicycle saftey towns… It would be really cool if there was a bike trail that had miniature versions of famous American buildings and monuments. You’d be riding your bike and then look! The St. Louis Arch! Get your photo taken next to it and you’ll look like Godzilla. There could even be world monuments. Look! It’s the Egyptian pyramids!
In Peoria there’s the Interplanetary bike ride where via bicycle you can tour the inner solar system from the Sun to Saturn and back. All the planets are set at different locations according to real-scale distances. This 24-mile ride takes about 3 hours.
2) Fun terrain
Another idea that would make for a fun bike trail is to make the trail have repeated mounds–kinda like speed bumps, but it would have a nice flow so you go up and down, up and down for like 15 seconds straight. And then the trail could have embankments shifting from left to right, left to right. So it will be like you are on the ocean.
Or there could be like fifteen seconds of those horizontal mini-bumps–much like the median on streets. A-drr-drr-drr-drr-drr-drr-drr
Or the trail could have a bunch of mini rocks to drive over. Or maybe crushed G.I.Joe figures.
3) Color schemes
As you ride along, there could be 200 foot stretches where everything in the area is painted one color. So you could enter the yellow section, then the blue section. Blue benches. Blue pavement. Blue flowers. Blue public artwork.
4) Tire tracks
Have a part of the trail have three-foot poles with different colored chalk attached at the end of the pole. You are encourage to pick up a pole at the start of the trail and ride along with the chalk dragging on the ground. At the end of the section, there’s a bucket for people to put the chalk poles back. The only problem is that you have to make sure that people only drag the chalk along one section.
It would be cool to dump a bucket of paint at one end to make cool trails, but then people would get paint all over their tires. But hey, we are just tossing ideas out here.
Other ideas?
Any fun ideas for a bicycle trail? Please leave them in the comments below. Or even if you know about any existing bicycle trails that have a creative idea.
This topic was inspired by a car ride with my girlfriend Lisa Wells.
YES! because i LUVed bicycle safety school. i miss going to safety town!
We should crash safety town some day! Say, here’s a fun themed bike trail. The North Shore Channel Trail in Chicago. There’s about 70 public art sculptures in two miles. That’s really cool! Someone took a few photos of some of the sculptures. That reminds me, I’ve been wanting to document ALL the public sculptures and make a gallery online of it.
It would be cool to have a mystery trail where people are given clues along the ride to figure out the mystery. Every year there would be a new mystery. Although it would be fun to have a new one every week to really encourage people to ride every week. But that sounds like a lot of work.
The buildings are really interesting …and funny, too! For sure, you seem to be a giant near them!
Oh that’s not me in the photo. That’s just some photo I grabbed off flickr. I link back to the original flickr user’s page in the image. Here are my flickr photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/16706861@N00/