“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” — H.L. Mencken

The notion that you have to have transit beforehand (or at least simultaneously) in order to justify density is that kind of answer. It’s intuitive, but it’s wrong. Short of master-planning an entire new community from the top-down, like they do in China maybe, density always — always — comes before transit. This is because if you don’t already have density-induced traffic problems demonstrating the need for transit, The Powers That Be use it as an excuse to never build it! That’s just how city planning and transit planning in America work, and it’s not going to change no matter how ass-backwards any of us might think it is.

In reality, there are three options when planning new development:

1. Refuse to build the new development because it’s too dense and would ruin the traffic.
2. Insist on including a fuckton of parking and maybe even turning the adjacent street into a stroad in the name of “capacity.”
3. Build the new development without the fuckton of parking, knowing full well that it’s going to make driving there suck, because you understand that the public will Deal With It and adjust by walking and biking more.

Only one of those three options (edit: option #3, if it isn’t blindingly obvious from context) is good urbanism; the other two perpetuate car-dependency (either because of sprawl or because you’ve created urban canyons of car sewers lined by parking decks, respectively).

“Option #4, build mass transit along with the development” is not and never will be on that list. Insisting on it is equivalent to picking option #1. Mass Transit only becomes a possibility after the area has a well-established pattern of picking #3, and even then it takes years or decades after that.

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If you’ve been around as long as I have, having spent decades not just online but especially IRL in planning meetings, listening to people arguing for mythical option #4 even though you know (because they’ve also been at the meetings for years) they understand the above perfectly well and are absolutely NIMBY concern trolls whose actual preference is #1, you’d become more skeptical of the argument.

But even then, it wasn’t just that general misconception / ‘comment difficult to distinguish from trolling’ that caused me to remove the comment. It was the addition of the much more concrete, specific, and easily provable (if it had been true) claim that development without parking causes vacancy – not traffic/parking problems for the surrounding area, vacancy for the development itself, specifically – and then refusal to prove it after I gave him the opportunity, that pushed it over the edge.