We visited Berlin for the first time last weekend. One of the things that I thought was very noticeable was the relatively low volume of motor vehicles in the city centre. At one point on the Sunday we were crossing the Kurfürstendamm and the nearest car (being driven as opposed to parked) was at least half a mile away down the road! Now, part of the reason for there being fewer cars about is very likely due to the good provision of cycling infrastructure* and public transport. But I also noticed the almost complete lack of HGVs clogging up the streets - and yet businesses in the city centre don't seem to struggle.
Basically, Berlin seemed to have plenty of road capacity, but it wasn't congested. And I think that was because of a combination of regulation (e.g. on HGV access) and the widespread provision and ease of use of alternative transport facilities (and I'd include wide footways and other pedestrian friendly provision** within that, as well as public transport and cycling infrastructure).
This in a city with roughly seven times the population and twice the population density of Edinburgh (and roughly the same population density as Glasgow).
I suspect that part of the problem for people like Nick Cook might be that they haven't seen, or at least properly understood, what has been achieved elsewhere. It's all too easy to regard what you experience every day in your local patch as being "the norm", allowing you to dismiss the way things are done elsewhere as being "unworkable here" or just "funny foreigners". Even if you have seen and understood, if it goes against your own ingrained expectations of being able to take your car everywhere, you'll likely dismiss it anyway, since it's easier to do that than to reflect on your own lifestyle choices and consider whether they might usefully be changed for the benefit of both yourself and everyone else.
* It probably helps if 70% of your city was reduced to rubble 75 years ago and you were able to rebuild it with lovely wide streets including pavements the width of the carriageway of an average UK residential street, so offering plenty of room for cycle lanes segregated from motor vehicles. I doubt such a solution would be well received in Edinburgh, though...
** For example, at traffic-light controlled junctions they don't stop all traffic and have a pedestrian only phase. How is that helpful you may ask? Because pedestrians get a green man when traffic on the road they wish to cross is stopped. Traffic turning in to that road must give way to pedestrians crossing on a green man - and it does, religiously, even waiting for people swithering about whether they really want to cross or not, rather than edging and barging their way through. In other words, when pedestrians have a green light, they have absolute priority.
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