Any argument which makes bikes better than cars, makes walking better than bikes; you keep ignoring that and diverting back to "bikes are better than cars". Yes bikes are better than cars. Walking is better than bikes.

> Fixing a flat takes roughly 5 minutes if you’re slow.

I googled "how long to fix a puncture" (it's a long time since I had to do that) and CyclistResource.com[1] says puncture repair glue takes 5-8 minutes to dry. My proverbial mother is not going to have her puncture fixed in the middle of a pedestrian street in 5 minutes, and when she ends frustrated and with chain oil on her tidy clothes and muddy wet hands with nowhere to wash them and I call her "slow" that will earn me a proverbial slap. Assuming she even knows what quick release is, and can find the tiny inconvenient weight-optimised tyre levers which she's sure are in her bag somewhere under all this stuff she actually cares about. It takes 5 minutes maybe true for a certain kind of bike enthusiast mechanically interested person, I doubt it's true for a majority of the population.

Going to a garage is less effort even if it takes more time. That's usually the trade off - longer, less effort. But even so that's you redirecting to cars away from walking. Nobody has to carry tyre levers and a Nike Air pump to fix even their fancy airwalk trainers, let alone their ordinary tidy going-out shoes.

I'll concede that you can pack more bikes into a parking space than I counted for, but even your estimate of approx 10 bikes per 4 meters means a city like Amsterdam of 800,000 people would need a row of bike parking 80km long just to cover a quarter of its population having a single place to park their bikes. No matter how multistorey that gets, by the time those people can park in many places (at home, work, green park, shopping, entertainment) it's a lot of city space for a benefit of a minority of people. And yes, before you say it, cars are much worse.

> It’s just us here; acting like a bike is soooo hard to deal with isn’t going to convince me, since I know how much effort bike maintenance takes and how much car maintenance takes

I also know how much effort bike maintenance takes, which is not a /lot/ but is more than I can be bothered with for the few situations they have value in. If a journey is short, walking is more convenient. If a journey is long, cars are more convenient. If there's something to carry, cars are more convenient. If there's a destination I need to go inside, walking is more convenient. If there's multiple people to go with, walking or driving are way more convenient. If there's a chance plans will change and I'll get a lift back or we'll meet up with other people, walking and cars are more convenient. Bikes only win out for people who want to ride a bike for the purpose of riding a bike (fun, exercise) or for people who have a short-car-journey distance to travel with little to carry, alone or with another biker, but don't want to use a car (for environmental, cost, or idealism reasons), or a blend of the two (a single digit mile commute they'd rather not drive).

> I don’t get your rage over bikes though, they’re a huge improvement over cars, and they are not otherwise causing problems relative to walking.

They are an improvement over cars. They aren't a huge improvement. Instead of a roof, you have to change your clothes and carry a change of clothes with you. Instead of a trunk you have to arrange your life around the limits of a bike to carry less stuff. Instead of an engine to go any distance comfortably you have to pay attention to distances and hills and how sweaty you are willing to get. Instead of freely wearing what you want, you have to wear clothes suitable for biking. Instead of having a lockable metal storage you have the inconvenience of not having that but still needing to carry bike things (helmet, lock, toolkit). Instead of being comfortbly on a sidewalk as a pedestrian or on a road in a car, you have to be annoyingly (maybe illegally) on a sidewalk or in danger on a road full of cars, or be lucky and go a diversion in the few places there happens to be a bike path.

They're a "huge" improvement over cars only if you take away all the conveniences of a car, and offload those things onto the person while pretending you aren't doing that.

> One tiny little nit you seem to have overlooked: walkers need and use sidewalks too

Walkers should get sidewalks without bikes. If I say you walk at 4mph and bike at 6mph you'll probably tell me you can average 20mph on your bike. If I say bikes don't mesh with people, and are an accident risk, you'll say bikes "use sidewalks too" and point to people sedately biking at 3mph among strolling pedestrians. If you're biking at a speed that's safe /and not annoying/ to pedestrians (i.e. not weaving between people, making them jump out of the way) then you're going slow enough that you're as well off walking. If you're going faster in a way that only a bike can, you shouldn't be on a sidewalk and need a dedicated concrete place to cycle fast.

All 800k people in imaginary Amsterdam pay taxes for sidewalks because all 800k people use them. All drivers pay fuel and road tax, all cars use roads. Bikers don't pay any special tax for roads or bike paths, which means the minority of bikers are subsidised by everyone else. It's not hyperbole, exaggeration, hatred or snark to point out this kind of thing.

> You could claim walkers don’t need sidewalks, but bikes don’t really need sidewalks either, plenty of bikes will ride on dirt paths comfortably.

Leaving a chewed up muddy plowed mess for everyone else to walk on. Walking on cobblestones is easy and comfortable, riding on them needs suspension and arms that don't mind juddering. But what I'm really claiming is that taxing 100% of the people to make sidewalks that 100% of the people use is fine. Taxing motorists for roads which their cars use is fine. Bikes get the benefit of lots of paved roadway, which they approximately need, without explicity paying in any way. If there were only sidewalks bikes would clash with people. If there weren't roadways, bikes would need them to be invented. If my mother needed a full suspension mountain bike to go to church on, she probably wouldn't. If cars vanished, bikes don't provide anything like the income for the upkeep of the roads left behind by cars if cars vanished. If instead you move to a model where bikes need hundreds of km of bike paths weaving through the city seperate from sidewalks, and then you move to a model where bikers are the people who pay for that, bikes will become a lot less desirable.

Even the limited convenience and usefulness bikes have (which is nonzero) is enhanced by leaning on a car-culture and would struggle hard to stand on its own merits.

[1] https://cyclistresource.com/how-long-does-puncture-repair-gl...