BICYCLE FRIENDLY COMMUNITIES
REN BARGER Let me share with you, Tulsa, my home at the river bend, as I ask you to consider how movement is culturally meaningful, how it affects changes in social condition and status. Movement can be 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 our nation, cities and society. It's fair to say that the planners and developers of my city — not unlike much of
American drivers in the Frontier like to believe they are free to move, but I have found free and equal mobility to be a myth. the Plains region — shaped it according to moving personal automobiles as quickly as possible from one point to another. I wonder if it ever occurred to them that personal motorized conveyances might not be accessible or affordable to large
numbers of citizens? Or, that there could and would be consequences to pedestrians, the disabled, and drivers of humanpowered vehicles? The architects of Frontier infrastructure failed the single mother who has to navigate a drainage ditch with her baby in stroller to get to the grocery store. They endangered the student walking to school and confined the elder whose eyesight is too-far-gone to drive. They stripped the dignity from the veteran who lost the use of his legs in his service abroad. AMERICAN BICYCLIST 25