It’s almost exclusively populated with middle aged middle class white people.
Designing everything for cars, and providing only terrible bus service, is a deliberate policy choice. Not to call anybody who lives there now racist, but historically speaking, this outcome wasn’t by accident.
According to Google Maps, it takes 17 minutes to walk entirely across the isthmus our downtown sits on, from the Edgewater Hotel to the Monona Terrace convention center, and you have to detour around the state capitol to do so. That’s about 10 blocks, and between city, county, and private parking structures, significantly longer than the distance between any destination and nearby parking.
But then, back to the topic of the meme, drivers will willingly add another 20 minutes to their commute by perversely choosing to sit in a traffic congestion, when they could park at a free park-and-ride lot and take the BRT downtown. Last time I went with my mother to a show at the performing arts center, we spent over 20 minutes breathing exhaust fumes just waiting to get out of the parking ramp. (Like many Baby Boomers, she’s weird about public transit. She lives two blocks from a BRT station; we could’ve been home already in the time it took to exit the ramp.)
Same thing in my city. People kvetch endlessly about how hard it is to park downtown. But the city parking utility studies show parking utilization nowhere near 100%, even at peak times. As a friend put it to me years ago, unless there’s a spot within line-of-sight (so even just around the corner doesn’t count) of their destination, drivers say that “there’s no parking.”
Recall that psychological experiment in which the researchers had volunteers sit for 15 minutes in a room, completely empty except for a device with which they could administer themselves a painful electric shock. If I remember correctly, more than half of the people zapped themselves, just for something to do.
The upshot: We need to let people administer themselves painful electric shocks at bus stops. /j
Since people usually quibble and kvetch about fair comparisons based on cloudy vs. sunny, or camera angles making the favored photo look better (as if a car sewer would be meaningfully improved with better lighting), I’ll get in on the action (tongue in cheek-style):
This comparison isn’t fair, as it makes the car-less space look empty and desolate. All of the people are far from the camera, tucked in the background, while the cars are in the foreground, making it look well-traveled and vibrant. Never mind that there are probably lots more people in the ‘after’ image. (It’s hard to say for sure, because of the bus, ironically. Clearly a lot more people strolling than in the cars.)
The way that many carbrains speak, it seems that they regard roads as naturally-occurring, geological features. (E.g. the Lemming who argued that pushing for cycling was harmful to people in undeveloped nations, who will have to drive in coming years, because bike lanes are too expensive for their governments to construct.)
No surprise, I just don’t want to accuse people of racism presumptively. But even here, a city with a “progressive” reputation, one of the perennial objections to having rail service to Chicago is that it would bring in “Chicago crime” (read: Black people). As if, 1. Chicago is a crime-infested hellhole, 2. people from Chicago would organize some crime-spree field trips up this way, and 3. they have never heard of Interstate 90/94. (What could possibly make more sense than to commit crimes, and then get away on a vehicle with a 100%-predictable route? Even more genius than the fool-proof water escape! /s)