A wonderful illustration showing how much public space we’ve handed over to cars

you have seen the rest of the street in streetview? i'll list some of the things i can see which people have to walk around on that street.

a cafe right next door with tables out on the street.

bike racks for private bikes about 20m away

the galway coke bike sharing scheme has at least a dozen spots there too

two shops opposite the cafe has placed flower pots outside their door

stainless steel bollards running along one side of the street

a roadworks sign

several motorbikes parked across (rather than along) the street.

mountain warehouse have several deckchairs left outside their shop.

several bins

if it is to be argued that the bike in that photo is inconsiderately parked for people with mobility issues, the whole street is a disaster for people with those issues.

the statement 'we don't give any space to cars, we give it to the people who are using those cars' makes no sense or is superficial to the point where it has no meaning.

in order for people to use those cars, we have sacrificed a huge amount of public space to those cars. i've just been to the bottle bank, and decided to keep rough tabs on car occupancy on the cars that passed on the way back. i suspect the proportion of single occupancy cars i saw was about 60%+. that's a huge amount of public space given over to what is the most inefficient form of transport known.

and regarding the other points - the law of the sea does not apply on roads, nor should it. it is not a case that we should design public infrastructure so that the larger and faster users get priority simply by dint of being larger and faster; and it's also worth noting that on the way back i passed about half a dozen cars parked in maybe 200m of cycle lane. which goes back to what Seth mentioned; if they stuck a physical kerb in to protect that cycle lane there'd be uproar.