People standing, man manspreading on the 9.
People standing, man manspreading on the 9. Charles Mudede

Should Metro follow the example of Metropolitan Transportation Authority and wage a war on a behavior that is, to begin with, ugly and hogs space on a bus seat? The ethics of public transportation are not those of our society as a whole. Individualism might be at home in a corporate boardroom but it certainly has no place on a bus or subway. Manspreading is anti-social, and we are finding ourselves in a city whose increasingly complicated workings will not improve if its inhabitants do to not become more social. We are using Metro more and more, and we need all the space we can share. Social engineering would be the leading weapon in a war on manspreading. One thing we learned from Bogota is that behaviors can change if they are publicly shamed. Even celebrities we admire and love, like Matthew Broderick, are not safe when a shaming campaign is aggressive.