The quick and the dead

Can cycling repair the consequences of our addiction to our cars?

Movement is essential to the human condition. Working at Tulsa Hub, where the mission is to change lives through cycling, is not just about promoting bicycling as an everyday transportation option. I also encourage an examination of the relationship between movement and mobility.

Mobility is not just movement through geographic space. It is the intertwined physical, technological, social, economic, political, and experiential dimensions of human movement. It is culturally meaningful. It affects changes in social condition and social status. It is a lens through which privilege and disadvantage, power and powerlessness, are revealed.

Streets and transportation systems are the civic inheritance of cultures. They are a reflection of the values and priorities of nations, municipal and societal. The street is also an expression of domination and power, where hierarchy of size, speed, affluence, and privilege dramatizes the relationship between the Quick and the Dead.

At the close of 2004, when I was 21 years old, an accident left me with a broken neck and fractures across eight other bones. I was on my bike when the car hit. Then, I was in a wheelchair for two months. Just as I was learning to walk again, my sister, 18, was killed in a car accident. Needing full-time care, I was invited to return here, to the place of my birth. As I grieved, I began to peer deeply into my new community and our wayfinding.

Americans like to believe they are free to move, but free and equal mobility is a myth. Some are in charge of it, some are excluded or even imprisoned by it. In the car-centric world, it’s difficult to take seriously the bicycle, that kids’ toy, that “sporting good,” that thing that makes you sweat, as a form of transportation. But now we are remembering as a society that the bicycle is a means to get around. To those living in poverty, a transportation bicycle can mean the difference between unemployment and income, which means the difference of living in a home or living “on the streets.”

At year six as leader of a social business, my work is more focused on the bicycle as a tool of socio-political, environmental, and cultural change. In an era of growing public concern over increasingly expensive fossil fuels, climate change, the sustainability of consumption-oriented lifestyles, obesity and “preventable” disease epidemics, and interest in reducing the scale of everyday life, the bicycle helps people “get around how they get around,” as the late Susie Stephens, a prominent bicycle advocate during the 1990s, said.

Mayor Dewey Bartlett’s affable voiceover greets visitors to the Tulsa International Airport with “selling points” of our fair city. Tulsa, he says, has the “second-shortest commute time of any city in America.” See here the prejudice of the automobile defining the totality of Tulsa’s transportation culture. Bicycles in the city are the wave of the future for car-choked, financially-strapped, obese, and sustainably-sensitive urban areas, and something for which Americans—60 percent of whom say they would bike more if conditions on the roads were safer—may be ready for.

Here’s the vision of victory for my particular social-justice crusade (or, at least, what would help me sleep better at night): that the definition of “transportation” no longer be limited to the means of the system of conveyance itself rather than the people involved. When you see a cyclist, see a member of your community—a parent, a sibling, a person who survived their childhood, a person who means the world to someone in their life, a person who is trying to make sense of this city with the only ways and means they have been given or earned. Resist the urge to lay on the horn or lay on the gas. Let the person get to where they are going, because their journey is very long and full of danger. As the Flaming Lips sing, “It’s a very dangerous thing to do exactly what you want”—societal change is always dangerous. Dangerous—and mobilizing.

Ren Barger is the founding and current Executive Director of Tulsa Hub. The Tulsa Hub Syndicate conducts bicycling-for-transportation education courses, a community bicycle repair workshop open two nights a week, and daily earn-a-bike programs serving high-poverty adults and at-risk youth. For more info visit their Facebook page, or tulsahub.org.