[Elte]

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 ;]).