Tulsa Is A Recreational Cycling Destination. Why Doesn’t Anybody Bike To Work?

The date was June 8th. I was biking to work through the empty bike lanes of downtown Tulsa. It was one day after Tulsa Tough, our city’s annual ritual where a small group of people spends the weekend racing bikes and a much larger group urges them on while drinking beer. From the look of the place, you would never have known it had happened.

As I coasted down a desolate 3rd Street, my mind drifted to the words of Dario Rapps, the German professional cyclist who, just three days earlier, had sprinted to victory on that very spot in front of thousands of cheering Tulsans. “IT’S SO AMAZING … WE HAVE NOTHING THAT IS REMOTELY COMPARABLE TO THIS,” Rapps had shouted into the microphone during his post-race interview.¹

Let’s assume Mr. Rapps was talking specifically about cycling. (Unless he really is the world’s biggest Tulsa booster—has he tried the steak sandwich at Doctor Kustom?) What, apart from gifting him the keys to the city, are we to do with his assertion of Tulsan exceptionalism?

There’s the spirit of truth alongside the spirit of error in what he says. If we’re talking about the roughly 60 hours a year when Tulsa Tough comes to town, then, yes, Tulsa really is without peer. Is it among the most joyous, preternaturally emphatic celebrations of cycling culture—nay, of culture full-stop—in the United States today? I think it is.

But when we turn to the other 362.5 days, we must face the fact that there are a great many places remotely, even intimately, comparable to Tulsa. When the racing teams depart and the dartiers disperse, Tulsa resumes the status of a typical American mid-sized city. Driving is a necessity. Parking lots are everywhere. Six-lane highways masquerade as streets. Two- and three-car households are the norm. Bike infrastructure, so far as it exists, is disjointed, ill-conceived, and underutilized. Likewise with pedestrian paths and public transit. 

And still, people complain about the two-wheeled menace. When former Mayor G. T. Bynum was asked about his greatest regret from his time in office, he answered without hesitation: “the bike lanes.”

I’m not sure G. T. was being quite fair to himself there. Maybe I’m not, either: Tulsa does have a year-round bike culture. But it’s important to be clear about the ways that culture continues beyond Tulsa Tough, and the ways it doesn’t. 

For one thing, there is a constellation of formal and informal groups that sustain cycling in the long off-season: Tulsa Bicycle Club, the Divas, Project Dudeman, and, most notably, Bike Club, the non-profit that teaches safe cycling skills and gives away hundreds of bikes every year through the afterschool programs it runs across the city. (I’m the faculty sponsor of the Carver Middle School branch.) The Hardesty National BMX Stadium, which plays host to the US Olympic team, is another highlight.

This dedicated civil-society base—a dozen points of light, former Cyclist-in-Chief George H. W. Bush might have called it—is joined by an enthusiastic, if intermittent, showing from a section of the general public. On summer days when the weather is fair, the banks of the Arkansas fill with cyclists of all ages and phalanxes of mountain bikers advance down the trails of Turkey Mountain and Bales Park. 

So perhaps our German friend was right after all? Achtung! This rosy portrait has a gaping omission: cycling in Tulsa is almost entirely a matter of recreation and exercise, and not practical transport. On those same summer days when Riverside takes on the appearance of a Dutch resort town, the bike lanes that run through Tulsa’s actual neighborhoods are as empty as ever. Very few city residents use their bikes for commuting, running errands, or simply getting around town, though they may be enthusiastic recreational cyclists. The exemplary pillars of the cycling community are, through no fault of their own, a kind of Potemkin Village, behind which lies the boundless land of cheap gas, suburban sprawl, and the Route 66 centennial Guinness World Record attempt classic car parade.

This strange dualism, this fatal shallowness, will remain the dominant fact of life for Tulsa’s cyclists unless something changes. It explains why the person who rides 30 miles per week on the trails has no option to take the bike to the grocery store or to pick up the kids from school. Or why, at the end of a ride along the river, you load your bike into your car and drive home. 

***

I am a bike commuter, and thus a daily user of those unloved, green-dyed lanes. I’m able to do so through several strokes of fortune, above all that both my home and work are in bikeable parts of the city. I also live with someone who has a car, which I can usually borrow if I need to. So perhaps the true radicals in the bike-commuting fraternity would reject my membership. (Cyclists, like the political left with whom their opponents sometimes try to lump them, are prone to factionalism.)

But my situation is also a choice. I voluntarily give up certain freedoms in order to gain others. What I lack in cargo- and passenger-capacity, easy travel beyond the urban core, and imperviousness to weather, I make up for in free exercise, enjoyment of the outdoors, always-available parking, and the pleasurable sensation of having thousands and thousands of extra dollars in my bank account. 

Running into another commuter on the lanes, as I occasionally do, feels a bit like meeting a celebrity. I have a stock joke of suggesting we take a selfie to commemorate the meeting. So far, it’s never missed. I’ve started to know the familiar faces. We motley few form a community, however thin. We have a slightly different approach to things than the sportier types. We don’t always mesh perfectly with them. On the morning of the Blue Dome Criterium, I was going the wrong way for a block on the Archer Street lane, as is my habit to avoid a busy intersection. Most days the lane directions are academic anyway, since I’m the only one using them in either direction. But that morning, I pulled over to make way for a rider coming the other way, perched atop his carbon fiber racing machine. As he rocketed by me, he barked, “In this country we drive on the RIGHT!” 

The misanthropy I could handle, and he did have the law on his side. But his real crime was that the best insult he could come up with was a car metaphor. 

Not that I begrudge them, the spandex-clad legions. They greatly outnumber us commuters, and they keep Tulsa’s cycling vibrant. I have been one of them—no, there is no us and them. We’re all in it together, and this town is big enough for us all. Not least because, most of the time and on most of the roads, they aren’t around. Which is the whole problem.

***

Of course, there is another group “out on the lanes” who, on a given day, outnumber the commuters, the revelers, and the racers alike. These are Tulsa’s unhoused, many of whom rely on bikes as the most convenient and affordable means of transport. The city’s scant bike path network is a haven for them, and a boon to public safety, since it offers at least a modicum of separation between human bodies and cars.

Yet no one should be happy with this situation. The prevalence of the unhoused on Tulsa’s bike paths is emblematic of an unfortunate American prejudice according to which the only reason someone would walk, bike, or take public transit is that they can’t afford not to. The worst thing about this prejudice is that it’s substantially true. A third of households in the bottom income quintile don’t own a car, compared to only 3% in the top quintile. 

But transport inequality runs deeper than mere wealth; it’s built into the physical environment. Most Tulsans, like most Americans, live in some variant of suburbia. Single-family homes. Cul-de-sacs rather than through-streets. Amenities spread out over distances that make them impractical to access except by car. Public space minimized so that private space can be maximized. In such surroundings, so clearly meant to cater to the car while marginalizing all other modes of travel, who would give up driving? 

The answer, of course, is anyone who can’t afford the ballooning cost of car ownership. The result is that mass transit has come to be associated in the public consciousness with poverty and associated ills: petty crime, drug use, homelessness. What ought to be a social service par excellence becomes in effect an antisocial service, a kind of holding pen for the downtrodden who have no choice but to be there (“captive rider” is the technical term). It’s easy to see a parallel with the fate of American public housing, perhaps also with the failures of public school integration.

Most of all, the saga of transport inequality is a microcosm of the larger project of suburbanization, which consisted in encouraging anyone who could afford to evacuate the city to do so. You may feel I’m exaggerating, but ask yourself a serious question: when was the last time you rode the public bus in Tulsa?

The same stigmas, based in the same social conditions, extend to the plight of the pedestrian and the cyclist. That plight is now a quiet public health crisis. One of the main drivers of America’s exploding rate of traffic deaths is the suburbanization of poverty: poor people pushed out of cities by the affordability crisis, still carless, now finding themselves trying to inch along highway shoulders or dart across arterials just to get from point A to point B. Ironically, the old process of suburbanization is inverting itself, with deadly consequences.

The term “jaywalking” was popularized by the automobile industry to shift public perception of traffic danger from cars to pedestrians, “jay” being a contemporary term for “hick” or “fool.” Before then, it was common to speak of “jay driving.” But what happens when jaywalking, to say nothing of jaybiking, are the only possibilities the environment physically allows? It’s a question our city’s jayplanners should consider carefully.

***

None of this is inevitable. Tulsa could be a great cycling city, or at least a much better one than it is now. The recreational cycling community and the existing bike infrastructure are strong foundations on which to build. But I see at least four major obstacles to progress: the inadequacy of the bike lane network; the city’s poor street design and lack of density; the climate; and the attitudes of the residents. All four will have to be overcome for cycling to take its place as a viable alternative to the car. Mike Wozniak, the co-founder of Bike Club and former owner of bike-themed Soundpony Lounge in the Arts District, summed up the challenge as the combination of the “perceived lack of safety by potential commuting cyclists and the convenience that Tulsa’s car-centric infrastructure promotes.” 

Bike lanes are logistically the simplest but politically the most intractable problem. The prospect of giving up road space, whether travel lanes or parking spaces, seems to provoke unique vitriol in the conduct of local democracy, even in supposed cycling Meccas like New York City. It was this reflexive skepticism that led Tulsa to nix the Pine Street bike lane in 2021, just a year into its lifespan. 

But the Pine lane, like much of the city’s on-street network, was designed to fail. It was unprotected, meaning that only a strip of paint protects the rider from cars whipping by at 40 miles per hour. Only veteran cyclists are comfortable riding in such conditions. (“The simple act of lowering and enforcing speed limits,” Wozniak noted, would also be helpful.) Worse, despite extending over seven miles, the lane had almost no connectivity with other bike paths. This was because other paths for the most part simply did not exist along its route.

The same flaws plague the lanes that persist on 3rd, 6th, 11th, and Greenwood Avenue. Tulsa’s bike lanes frequently lead nowhere, fail to link up with one another, and have a tendency to vanish at major intersections, just where the protection they offer is needed most. Imagine if car roads were laid down in the same piecemeal, fragmentary way. It would be unsurprising if no one chose to drive on them.

On the other hand, lanes that are physically shielded from traffic and that intersect to form a coherent network have a well-documented causal relationship to increasing ridership. When high-quality public amenities are freely available, people use them.

Weather is not so much of an issue. Climate may be beyond our influence (to paraphrase Jim Inhofe), but how a city responds to it is not. We’re likely to always lose a few riding days to tornado season, but the oppressive heat of summer, which is an understandable deterrent for many, can be tackled with a simple and abundant technology: trees.

Green canopies cool neighborhoods by as much as seven degrees relative to ambient temperature, as anyone who has ever biked the five minutes from leafy Swan Lake to the concrete desert of the Pearl District can attest. Fully ensconced greenways, like the Midland Valley and Osage Prairie trails, are the ideal. But simply adding vegetation to neighborhood streets with bike lanes can make a huge difference. Doing so is critical to ensuing not just the efficacy of urban mobility, but also its fair distribution. Up With Trees is a vital asset, but the concentration of urban greenery in Tulsa’s wealthiest neighborhoods should shame us all.

A larger challenge, but one that may ultimately offer the best chance for productive consensus, is the long-term need to push the city toward a more urban, pedestrian-centric layout. This raises two distinct challenges: the design of streets and the density of structures on them. On the street design front, there is a divide, probably an insurmountable one, between the prewar neighborhoods surrounding downtown and the newer, suburban-style ones extending to the south and east. The former have narrow streets and a consistent grid, ideal for walking and biking. The latter are more like a series of suburban colonies bisected by grade-level highways. It is fatally impractical to try to free such a built environment from car dependency. It simply can’t be done.

Instead, the city should focus on adding bike lanes and improving connectivity in the halo of older areas ringing downtown: Greenwood and The Heights to the north; Kendall Whittier, the Pearl, and Florence Park to the east; Cherry Street and Maple Ridge to the south; Easton Heights, Owen Park, and West Tulsa to the west. That would create a target area of roughly 15 square miles. 

Next, to render bike travel practical, the city should set about densifying this core area as much as possible. Hopefully, this will happen anyway. There are much more important reasons to do it than cycling. A number of recent changes in the city’s urban fabric—the advent of the Arts District, downtown residential conversions, new affordable apartment complexes in North Tulsa—seem to suggest the collective acceptance of certain progressive urban planning ideas, like the idea that walkable downtowns with mixed-use zoning and ample shared space are the key to a city's viability. That compact, traditional streets are better for business and better for tax bases than malls surrounded by oceans of parking. That the way to solve the housing crisis is simply to build more homes.

***

I am optimistic that some version of these changes will come to pass in Tulsa in the near-ish future. But the final choice to take to the lanes depends on people and their attitudes. I accept that most Tulsans, like most Americans, and most Germans for that matter, love their cars and aren’t particularly interested in things changing. They associate cars with independence, and cherish the freedom to drive. Good news, then: no one is coming for that freedom any time soon. 

But it is also an illusory freedom. The vast majority of Tulsans are not free to drive; they have no choice but to drive, except when economic necessity relegates them to one of the perpetually dismal alternatives. 

I propose the converse proposition: the freedom not to drive. I dream of a Tulsa where a family of four can be a two-truck household living in West Tulsa or a zero-car household living in Sequoyah, in either case leading materially equivalent though culturally distinct lives, the only determinant being the free and unconditioned choice of lifestyles. I dream of car-independence being open to all who want it, rich or poor, transplant or native, young or old, able-bodied or otherwise.

The revolution of attitudes will come on the coattails of the reinvention of physical systems, if at all. In the year 2100, everyone will have exactly my political beliefs and Tulsa will be a transit libertarian free-for-all like Copenhagen or Amsterdam. In the meantime, can we please get a protected bike lane on 15th Street?