You're correct in that once you start building for cars your city sprawls out and other modes of transport become impractical.
I don't think the 27% number is particularly useful because it offers no context into the type of trip. No one is suggesting you use bicycles for intercity trips, but for city transport they're perfect. This is reflected in the mode share numbers for cities compared to the national average: Wikipedia has Amsterdam at 40% bike share with 29% public transport and 27% driving. In the context of a city, biking and public transport are the obvious choices to get more people into the same area.
I think you have a chicken and the egg problem in many cities where driving is hugely subsidised and no investment takes place in other transportation methods. For example, in the UK the majority of trips seem to be around 5 miles or less. By bike this is only a 30 minute commute at the extreme end. Once you account for traffic it ends up being only 10-20 minutes slower than driving the same distance.
Compared to the Netherlands cycling only makes up 2% of the national mode share. The difference between the UK and the Netherlands is that we have almost no investment in cycling infrastructure, and what we do get is typically poorly executed.
> Bicycles replace walking, not driving.
Personally I don't believe driving belongs in any city where you also want people to have an enjoyable time walking the streets and socialising. It's a perfectly acceptable way of getting between cities or from remote locations, but within a city there are almost always better options.
> Wikipedia has Amsterdam at 40% bike share with 29% public transport and 27% driving.
That's the thing: in Amsterdam. Who are those people that are responsible for half of all trips and where are they headed with their cars?
Looking at the map I wouldn't drive in this city as well - the distance from the city limits to the centre is less than 5km, so as much as I have from my apartment to the centre of the city I live in, and I generally don't drive into this 5km radius circle around here.
The problem is that the majority of people do end up driving within that ~5km limit in cities that don't invest in public transport and cycling infrastructure. In the UK most cities are around this size, but our modal share for cycling is much lower, despite similar climate conditions. The main difference I see is that we invest heavily in infrastructure suited for cars, but very little in public transport or cycling.
I guess what I'm trying to say is cities typically end up the way they do due to how their residents approach transport planning. You can either continue with a car centric approach that leads to more sprawl and a city center that's less welcoming/interesting to visit, or you can try to make the city friendly towards more efficient modes of transport that encourage people to onto the streets.
To get back to the article for moment which is really about how parking and cars destroy cities, the discussion about whether bikes/walking replace driving is missing the point somewhat.
The point is if you build city centres around the idea of biking/walking then you can have much smaller and compact cities centres which are more pleasant and suitable for biking/walking at the same time. Biking/walking doesn't replace driving so much as eliminate it.
For people coming from further away, you drive to the edge of the city centre, park (often in a multilevel car park), and then walk the last part to your destination. This is how most Dutch cities are set up. Bigger cities of course have more short distance public transport too.
What types of trips? Distance traveled isn't really a relevant metric if you consider that cars may be used between cities (where distances are longer) and bikes inside of cities.
I'm from the Netherlands, 30 years old and have never owned a car. I do most everything by bike and public transport, occasionally if the situation calls for it I rent or borrow a car (I know people with cars that, unsurprisingly, aren't being used all the time). It certainly depends on your exact living situation, but my impression is that infrastructure plays a big role. I lived in Amsterdam for 12 years, and almost everything in that city encourages you to use a bike, and almost everyone does. Recently I've moved to Germany, and even though it's generally considered a bike friendly country with lots of people owning bicycles, the infrastructure doesn't compare. Dedicated bike lanes are way less common, and whatever is there is often bad quality (avoiding bumps all the time is really energy consuming). Again, unsurprisingly, people use cars here over distances where it wouldn't even cross my mind.
Of course distance matters, and cars will be preferable for long distances with bad public transport connections. I've never found driving a car inside a city to make a lot of sense though, it's often not even faster taking congestion etc into account. Put the bike infrastructure in place, and people will use it. Lots of Dutch train stations now have what's referred to as a "public transport bike", a few euros lets you borrow a sturdy bike for a 24-hour period. Take a train into town, do the rest with the bike, it's all really simple and fast. I see this being added to large parking spaces outside of cities in the future (maybe they already have - I don't own a car so I wouldn't know ;]).
Bicycles replace both walking and driving trips. In Dutch cities, most people walk or cycle to the grocery store, which is a great example of cycling replacing walking trips.
In smaller villages however, that are more spread out and usually only have one or two grocery stores, people usually take the car or their bike to the grocery store, because walking is too far. In this case, bikes do replace trips by car.
Also note that in general, Dutch cities are quite walkable and cycleable. If I visit a friend on the other side of the city I live in, I go by bike. Which is about as fast as going by car. Going by public transport also takes about the same time. This is a result of the Downs-Thomson paradox [1].
Here in the UK, approx 10 million (about 16% of the population) people live outside of towns and cities. My nearest supermarket is seven miles away. Public transport is almost non-existent. Cars are a necessity not a luxury.
In cities (and I lived in London until six years ago) you needed a car for transporting shopping. Its either that or pay inflated prices at local convenience stores. Where I lived (Leyton) there were 1 or 2 supermarkets within a mile or two but other parts of London you had to travel further. Even with the much better public transport, you would not be able to carry more than a couple of bags of shopping. And much of London was just too dangerous to cycle on.
So I can understand why people like their cars even in cities.
It is said that in the Netherlands 27% of all trips are done by bicycle - IIRC it's the highest percentage in Europe.
What is not mentioned though is that 50% are done by car.
If you look at the distance traveled it's 75% car, 8% bicycle.
The cities in that country that have a higher trip percentage are tiny, 100k towns.
Bicycles replace walking, not driving.