Population: 46,292
Situation: Corporate Giants Wanted to Create a Great City for Employees
Action: Built miles and miles of bike paths
Result: Great city with a bustling downtown
Bentonville is best known as the birthplace and headquarters of Walmart. The Walton Family’s love of biking has helped this community drastically alter it’s image. Infused into the growth of the biking community is a corporate giant helping develop the city. Make no ifs, ands, or buts, the Walton family has greatly helped this community.
Bentonville and all of northwestern Arkansas feel like a like an idealistic small town where you everything is built on being able to bike there from the grocery stores to the diners to the museums. The Waltons have helped trail blaze 163 miles of trail alone at a cost of 74 million dollars to, in, and around Bentonville. With the Oz Trail Network from the other corporate giant – Tyson – has added another 300 miles of mountain bike trail. Together, according to the Bike Bentonville organization, in 2017 alone these trails helped bring in 137 million dollars to the region per year. Think how many businesses can be supported by that kind of money.
Before the investment into the regions bike paths, “Folks around here will tell you that no one came downtown about ten years ago, and now you see people everyday,” says Aimee Ross, director of Bike Bentonville. Yet today it’s once bleak city center is now bustling with life. The city center today fills with food trucks, vendors, farmers market. There are also museums, niche interest shops, an upscale bagel shop, and of course a bike rental store. Today everyone from families, to youngsters, to large groups of women come to the city on bikes. Its common to large groups of dirty mountain bikes leaned up against the local diner as groups of people come back from a day’s ride.
Today the downtown can support high end restaurants like Hive or museums like the “Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art” which is located right along the “Art Trail”. It is a rare feeling to get the feeling you are in a european city in the middle or Arkansas but yet Bentonville Accomplishes that. You can ride everywhere and are surrounded by the Arts.
It is starting to pull in large cycling events like the UCI Cyclocross World Championships or FayetteCross will come to Lafayette a neighboring town which helps fill up the whole regions hotels and get the bikes rented.
Today there is still 2-3 miles of trail being created per week, At this rate, I have no doubt Bentonville will become the mountain biking capital of the world.
In my opinion, this is exactly what the ultra-wealthy should be doing. Forget having to tax them into oblivion, let’s convince them to help build better communities. The Waltons loved biking and the arts so the pour tons of money into those things for the community, and have helped a whole community become more profitable and diversified. Thank you Waltons and well done!
In this case, it was the vision of Walmart’s founder, Sam Walton, who invests heavily into biking trails, funds Bike Bentonville, and funds the arts around Bentonville to allow others to capitalize on this source of tourism. make the life in town for his employees that much better.
Bentonville is not alone in using bike tourism as their creative city development, here are several other examples:
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