While the distances between the towns in Australia is massive, most of our population resides in a handful of urban coastal cities.
While car culture is historically dominant, the biggest cities are all seriously trending towards increased densification, and much of our substantial immigration over the past 2 decades had been from nations used to much denser living.
I leave open the question as to whether it is the answer to all societies problems, but it would be a brave man to proclaim that wasn't the way Australian cities and population hadn't been trending for the past 10 years, and we'll likely trend for at least the next 10.
Public transport from the suburbs to anywhere but the city or somewhere directly on the way, is terrible.
Will we have better cars that are less polluting, safer, even self driving? Sure. Will we get rid of personal motorised transportation? No.
> Will we have better cars that are less polluting, safer, even self driving?
Sure, whatever. Considering the huge amount of pollution that goes into just creating the car, it is silly to talk about less polluting. Safe? Yeah, that why the road toll is going up. Self driving? Can't come soon enough, since people are incapable of concentrating long enough and are too selfish to drive safely.
Private cars are a stupid idea, and have caused way more problems.
I will add in addition to my above post, that our high property prices are additionally feeding an additional densification trend...
You can google for "Australian Census 2016 quick stats" and get this information for most places in Australia.
Where I currently live is very atypical for Aus, about 75% of households here have 1 or fewer cars, but I've lived pretty much up and down the entire east coast and have a relatively intimate knowledge of both this country and the collection of information on it.
As Russel Coight might say: "I've bend around this wide brown land, seen a thing or two..."
Looking at aust-wide and state by state, it's as I described, at most (in wa and tas) 18% with 3+ cars, but 60+% fall into 1 or 2 cars per household. The rest is no car and no answer.
For completeness, one also has to ask whether or why we measure or comment using the statistical concept of households or persons.
Using WA as an example, ~34% of households had 2 cars. We can say that ~56% of households responded that they had access to 2+ cars. We can also say that almost ~75% of households responded that they had with 2 or fewer cars.
However, if we want to come up with an idea of a "representative australia" (an arguably increasingly erroneous concept by the day), we have to realise that the distribution of "people" amongst households will not be uniform.
Indeed, there is likely a strong correlation between the number of people in a household and the number of cars in a household.
What this means is that although only 56% of "households" reported having 2+ cars, the number of "persons" who experience life in such a household is not proportionate to the number of households reporting each characteristic in the population.
Indeed, given that one stat is likely correlated with singles, students and dinks, and the later is likely correlated with early and extended families, you would likely find that on a population weighted basis, the 2-3 car households may need to be counted as some multiple of the single/no car households.
But people here are too addicted to them, and couldn't even imagine going down to the shops without a car. And make lots of excuses about it, such as it is too far and too big.
And from personal experience I can tell you that any argument of not needing a car goes out the window as soon as someone has kids. Discussion over. Unless you're volunteering to cart around all the shit parents take with them?