John Mulaney, Natasha Lyonne and the Battle of the Bike Lanes
The War on Cars
The War on Cars, LLC
4.9 • 937 Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2025
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Recently, on an episode of the Netflix show Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney, the subject turned to bike lanes. Or rather, the subject was turned to bike lanes by Natasha Lyonne. The actress, writer, director and producer said that bike lanes should be “shut down” and claimed that there is no space for them in Manhattan. Journalist Alissa Walker of Torched was on Everybody’s Live as a “public transit expert” to talk about Uber, but soon found herself — as a public-transit-riding Los Angeles resident — defending bike lanes and explaining the rational apportionment of urban space to some pretty famous New Yorkers, all of them brilliant and talented. So why is it that otherwise intelligent people often say unintelligent things about bikes? Why do nearly all conversations about transportation, even one that’s not about bicycles, devolve into NIMBY-style complaints about cyclists? What can advocates learn from a conversation that, if you strip away the big stars and the studio audience, was indistinguishable from a community board meeting?
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LINKS:
Support Alissa Walker's outstanding journalism by becoming an annual subscriber to Torched... and save $10!
Read Doug Gordon’s take on the Everybody’s Live episode in Streetsblog.
Watch Everybody's Live with John Mulaney on Netflix.
Read the reaction to the episode on Reddit.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's been just over one month since I picked up the new Extra Cycle RFA. |
| 0:06.0 | I love this bike. |
| 0:07.0 | I've put over 100 miles on it already, just running errands around the neighborhood, and riding the RFA has been so much fun. |
| 0:14.1 | It has totally changed my life. |
| 0:16.1 | But I get it. |
| 0:17.1 | What if you live in a place where cars are king? |
| 0:19.5 | Maybe you're wondering how an e-cargo bike can change your life. |
| 0:23.6 | That's why I spoke to Riley, a dad from Tucson, Arizona. |
| 0:27.6 | Even though he and his wife had been biking for transportation for years, |
| 0:31.6 | having two growing kids meant he found himself driving more than he wanted to. |
| 0:35.6 | I was driving my kids 10 miles round trip twice a day, in traffic, in a car. |
| 0:43.4 | And it really wasn't good for me. |
| 0:45.1 | I could feel that driving and being in traffic, I didn't feel good doing it. |
| 0:50.6 | And I also felt like I was doing my kids a disservice, having them cooped up in a car |
| 0:56.1 | on main roads and in traffic. |
| 0:58.3 | When I was driving a lot, I just thought like I can't do this year round. |
| 1:02.4 | As the kids got bigger, Riley and his wife faced a choice, and they decided to make biking |
| 1:08.1 | work for their family. |
| 1:10.0 | We had just one car that we shared and we didn't want to have a second car. |
| 1:14.6 | So it felt cheaper to own an extra cycle with E-assist. |
| 1:19.6 | It's also a lot cheaper to maintain. |
| 1:21.6 | It costs almost nothing once you get it. |
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