The author of this article is European, and one thing Europeans can never understand is how big the world is and how low population density can be in many massive countries around the world.
It's a very European perspective to make forecasts like this and to be baffled at why the rest of the world is moving much slower in reducing car usage. Cars will always dominate in a country such as Australia, for example, due to how massive the surface area of the country is and how few of us there are that live here. Our largest city has a population of five million, but it's so large physically that you could fit in all of Greater London, the Paris urban area, all of Madrid, all of Berlin, and still have enough space left over to fit in Greater London once again. Those are the biggest cities in western Europe and together there are 39 million people living there all told.
So in one part of the world, you can have 39 million people living in an urban area which is slightly smaller in area than a place in another part of the world which only has five million people. And you can just imagine what the second place is like. How far away everything is. How unconnected public transport networks are. It's not a place where you can just get rid of cars, they're the only practical way of moving people around over such vast distances.
Europeans don't understand this because nothing in their life experience prepares them to deal with it.
