Author doesn’t like cars. My guess is he’s not a fan of most American cities.
No, Fei, his point was that the planners of Brazilia decided that residents would drive to bus and subway stops on an X grid while walking is too far from the stops and then ride the mass transports from those too far stops. Think about a transit system that has only 24 centralized stops with parking lots for a city planned to have 2 million residents. It is inadequate to service them if those residents cannot walk to their mass transit, depending on private automobiles to first get to the mass transit. It combines the worst of both systems, and the advantages of neither. That is what he was referring to in the article.