A Round and a Roundy: Drivers are Just Manspreaders

Our national treasure cartoonist Bill Roundy has been reading all our coverage of soaring bike counts on First and Second avenues and the metaphor-manufacturing segment of his fevered brain kicked in immediately.

Car drivers are like manspreaders on the subway: they take up all the room — and then act all self-righteous about it, too.

In this case, however, cyclists can’t just move to a different subway car — if there’s not enough room to cycle safely up First Avenue, it’s not like cyclists can just shift to Third Avenue. As Streetsblog reported last month, First Avenue’s bike lane and pedestrian improvements have made that roadway far safer. For instance, between 34th and 42nd streets, there were 78 total reported crashes on First Avenue in 2019, injuring six pedestrians and no cyclists. But on the same stretch of Third Avenue, which does not have protected infrastructure, there were 180 reported crashes, injuring five cyclists and five pedestrians (and killing one pedestrian) in the same one-year-period.

All of Bill Roundy’s cartoons are archived here.