Street photography tip: JPG or RAW: An old debate

Michiel, I think shooting in Raw is ALWAYS the best choice if you’re going to convert the photo to b&w. Not only because you can recover more detail during post-processing. Much more important to me is that when converting to b&w, you can determine the contrast for each color and thereby also guide the viewer’s attention. With JPG that is quite a bit more complicated, if not virtually impossible.
The argument about the large files taking up a lot of space on the hard drive no longer applies at all. First of all, storage capacity has grown enormously nowadays. 2. You have the option of external hard drives or SSDs. 3. What do you think of a NAS? If you go about it a little sensibly, you basically don’t need to have a single photo stored on the PC or laptop.
There isn’t a single photo, Lightroom library or Luminar library on my C drive. They are on other internal/external drives.
When it comes down to it, you don’t have to keep all RAW files indefinitely either. You throw away the failures anyway, because everyone has those.

Michiel, the fact that I always shoot in Raw when doing street photography has nothing to do with uncertainty about the result. For me, street photography is particularly suited to showing that in b/w. Even more so than in colour (with exceptions).
Photographing in Raw is, in my view, the best way to be able to exert maximum influence on the result. Whether that is b/w or colour actually does not matter then.
With Raw, you can carry out a conversion to b/w in the best way, because as I indicated earlier, you can work with each colour to achieve good contrast in the photo, allowing you to guide the viewer. You can also see that in the photo you included with the article. The man with the cap is clearly the main subject and the eye-catcher. Nice photo, by the way. I like seeing something like that. The lack of colour is precisely what makes that photo so good.