A Round and a Roundy: Streets are For People — Especially Now

All it took was a brief walk through Park Slope to show our cartoonist the folly of Mayor de Blasio’s management of the streets during the coronavirus crisis.

On Sunday, the Big Dog in Albany demanded that the Tall Man come back today with a plan for closing streets to cars so pedestrians could get around in a socially responsible (and socially distant) manner, but later in the day, the mayor was still balking.

“If we have a street opened up for recreation, we have to do that smartly because we have to attach enforcement to it,” the mayor said. “If we just close streets, I guarantee people will start to congregate. … If you put barriers at the end of a block and everyone comes out like it’s normal, we can’t have that.”

Well, that’s not how our cartoonist sees it. Right now, car drivers are still seizing virtually every inch of the public roadway for the storage or movement of their vehicles. But in a crisis, everyone needs to sacrifice, says cartoonist Bill Roundy, in his latest classic.

All of Bill Roundy’s cartoons are archived here.