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September 22, 2005 Supersize Strollers Ignite Sidewalk Drama By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

ONE recent evening during rush hour on a Washington subway, Jose Rivas found himself cornered by a giant stroller, with no clear path of escape. "She saw us," Mr. Rivas, 33, said of the woman pushing the buggy. "She looked at us. She was basically like: 'You better find a way to get out. It's not my responsibility.' "

When he tried to step around her to reach the door, her look became a glare. The confrontation was like a battle, he said, and the weapon, a long, army-green-colored stroller.

Christopher Peruzzi, 39, of Freehold, N.J., has also had to dodge baby strollers - especially those that are "double wide or triple long" - usually in stores, and he doesn't like it either. "They're blocking off products you want to get to," he said. "I find this particularly annoying in Barnes & Noble and Walden Books. I'm here to read. I'm not here for your kid to slam into me."

Pricey, supersize baby strollers like the Bugaboo and the Silver Cross - nicknamed Hummers - have been derided as symbols of yuppie extravagance. (They cost upward of about $700.) But some critics now say that size is not the only problem. What's worse, they say, is the way some parents use them to bulldoze their way through public places.

"I liken it to the SUV experience," said Elizabeth Khalil, 28, a lawyer in Washington. "It's just your mission to mow down everything in your sight because you can."

Critics - many of them people without children - rarely raise the issue with their friends who are parents. But they voice their complaints in conversations with one another and in online chat rooms. And many are beginning to suspect that the new big strollers are the latest fissure in a long-standing divide between parents and nonparents, a disagreement that usually goes unspoken, over who has made the right choice in life.

"These women have a child, and they're like, 'Look at me,' " said Ophira Eisenberg, 33, a stand-up comedian from the West Village who refers to oversize baby strollers as lawn mowers. "It's like this baby is more important than anything, and everyone should be bowing down because they created life."

Parents who use the supersize strollers dismiss the notion that they are inconsiderate or think of themselves as superior. "If anything I am particularly self-conscious about the stroller in public places, that I'm not bumping into people," said Chris Ford, a stay-at-home father in Las Vegas and the owner of a red Bugaboo Frog. "A stroller is something a parent uses all the time. It's one of those things, like eyeglasses. You're always using them. You don't want to cheap out on them."

Mr. Ford, who offers thoughts about parenting on ModernDayDad.com, said that owning a Bugaboo means that he never has to worry if the stroller will be able to handle certain terrain - and it's an eye-pleaser. "I like how it comes in solid colors. It's not some sort of ugly plaid or ducks and bunnies," he said. "I love its industrial design. I love how it's made of metal, how strong it is."

"If you've got a problem," Mr. Ford said, "then you've got issues beyond my stroller."

Traci Anderson, 36, of Groton, Conn., who is married and said she has decided not to have children, agrees that the issue runs deeper than taste. Often, while trying to pass someone with a large stroller, she has seen the parent acknowledge her presence but make no attempt to move. And that, she said, begs the question of whether they believe people with children have a special claim to sidewalk space.

"My choices and what's important to me shouldn't be seen as any less important in the grand scheme of things," Ms. Anderson said.

More and more strollers, large and small, are rolling into the pedestrian world. Sales in the United States were $530 million last year and the market is only expected to keep growing, according to the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association. (Sales of Bugaboo alone tripled from 2003 to 2004.)

Starting in the mid-1960's and for decades, most strollers were the lightweight umbrella sort, not including the Baby Jogger that arrived on the scene in the mid-1980's. The S.U.V.-stroller frenzy ignited a few years ago, after a Bugaboo Frog appeared on "Sex and the City." That model went on to achieve a status not unlike an Hermès Birkin bag. This month Bugaboo introduced two new stroller models - the Gecko ($679) and the Cameleon ($879) - designed to traverse bustling sidewalks, sandy beaches and rough, woodsy terrain.

There are advantages that go beyond maneuverability, status and smart looks. Ali Wing, the mother of a 2-year-old boy and the founder and chief executive of giggle, a baby retailer, said the wheels on big strollers last longer than those on smaller buggies, and many parents like the way some of them allow the baby to face the walker. Ms. Wing also said that umbrella strollers are not as cushiony and protective. And the younger a baby is, the more emphasis parents place on comfort and safety.

In July a $600-plus Mountain Buggy Urban Double Stroller helped shield a 7-month-old baby as a Manhattan building collapsed around her, setting off a flurry of posts in parenting chat rooms about the potential value of utility strollers.

Yet size is no guarantee of a stroller's safety, said E. Marla Felcher, an adjunct lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the author of "It's No Accident: How Corporations Sell Dangerous Baby Products." "There are no mandatory safety standards for strollers," she said. "There is no way for any parent to know if one stroller is safer than another."

"What they know," said Ms. Felcher, who described herself as childless by choice and who admitted that the new big strollers annoy her, too, "is, 'I'm a parent that can afford to spend $700 on this.' " Not having children "doesn't mean I hate kids," she said. "But I do hate the parents who somehow have decided that they are superior to everyone else because they have kids."

It might help, Ms. Felcher and others said, if parents and nonparents could talk about their feelings toward one another. "It's the last taboo in this culture," Ms. Felcher said. "You just can't talk about it."

Ms. Anderson agreed, "We're a bit afraid of expressing our opinions for fear of being labeled as people who hate children or who do not support women."

Stroller dramas play themselves out every day: on sidewalks, in supermarkets, in museums. At a Disney theme park, a member of an online forum wrote, "I got rammed so hard on the back of my heels in Adventureland, that they actually bled." The writer, who used the moniker Tigertail777, described the offending stroller as a "huge plastic molded S.U.V." Later the same day, according to that account, another stroller knocked Tigertail777 in the shins near the Haunted Mansion.

But on the same chat room - MiceChat.com - several parents said they try to be considerate of others in the theme parks. "I have bumped into folks that all of a sudden change directions or stop all of a sudden in front of me (for no apparent reason)," wrote one parent known as DznyVan, "but I always apologize (even if it was their fault)."

Todd Levin, a writer and comedian, said he saw an especially illustrative stroller encounter two years ago at Kennedy Airport. It happened after the mother accidentally bumped the nonmother with a stroller that Mr. Levin, 34, said looked like a "massive SUV."

"Could you please not bump me with your stroller," the woman said, according to a play-by-play account Mr. Levin wrote on his Web site, Tremble.com. "I have a cat in my bag."

"Excuse me," the mother replied. "If I knew you had a cat in your bag, I wouldn't have bumped you!" Then she turned to the other travelers nearby, widening her eyes in exasperation.

An argument ensued, but Mr. Levin concluded that it was less about the collision than about who had made the better life choice, the mother or the cat owner. "The Biological mom was much, much worse, in my opinion, if only for her very clear sense of superiority," Mr. Levin wrote. "With each swipe she took at the Feline Mom she seemed to be making a transparently veiled assertion that having babies is what makes us better people. Having babies means winning."

Mr. Levin is far from the only person writing about stroller wars on the Internet. "Clogging up the paths of shoppers everywhere, these plastic monstrosities often contain piles of shopping bags, purses, grocery bags, extra sandals, sunscreen, diapers and no baby whatsoever," wrote Nathan Alexander of Los Angeles on his Web site, Commercialsihate.com. "The Baby Bulldozer is a total nuisance. There's no way around it, over it, or through it, and the oncoming parent inevitably steers it directly toward your feet."

Mr. Alexander told his girlfriend, "If I have a baby, I'm carrying it in a backpack."

"My parents," said Mr. Rivas, who had the stroller standoff on the Washington Metro, "they would make us walk."

But what if the roles were reversed? What if Mr. Rivas was the parent with the stroller, making his way home during rush hour on a steamy summer evening? He chuckled, then conceded, "My opinion might change if I had kids."