I can appreciate that the analogy has some holes if looked at from a particular perspective, and I'm not going to address every single person that says so, but I actually think it's pretty meaningful if you look at the comments throughout this thread.

For instance, you say I can't drive a car on the sidewalk, and that's true. I also cannot ride my skateboard in the street. Ok, so far so good. So can I ride my skateboard down the sidewalk? If you read this threat you'll see that a lot of people are deriding that, citing 'near misses' and 'close calls' and actual collissions. So ok, can ride the skate board in the street, can't ride the skate board on the sidewalk according to some folks, so where then? Maybe just some unoccupied ares around buildings? Nope, skating is banned at almost any building and they even hire guards like this to chase you away.

Skate boarding IS pretty much banned everywhere in practice. All in the name of nuisance and safety. The reality is we allow cars to continue to exist because we find their usefulness to outweigh the dangers (or at least we say so right until we get into an accident, but then you're usually dead, so who cares what we think at that point.) And hey, maybe that's fine, maybe skateboards just aren't very useful and are too much of a nuisance, i just don't think so. And I think that their nuisance or 'danger' is a straw man argument to let people get rid of a hobby they find 'annoying' or 'distasteful'.