Also, during the time of the transition there was a very vocal parents group ( mothers iirc ) who protested all the traffic deaths.
And everybody uses a bike, even our Prime Minister.
Regarding the shop owners : maybe it is part of their problem and maybe they could reclaim a part of their clientele if only there was short term parking in the street ( for boomers ).
Also, plenty of retailers did migrate to hybrid or online only.
But your 'mid-nineties writing on the wall' is just irrelevant hindsight.
Even I was skeptical about some of the more outlandish stuff and it all came true, and then some. We had live video in the browser in 1995. Yes, it's hindsight, but it couldn't be anything else because time has passed. But there were lots of people with actual foresight back then and all you had to do was listen to them to see where the future would go, it was as inevitable as the tides. Even the .com bust was more of a temporary setback (and the implosion of many bubbles that urgently needed imploding) than a real problem.
The point is, and we can bicker about the timing but I don't think that is all too relevant here: there were plenty of indicators that brick & mortar stores would sooner or later have competition. Minitel in France was a pretty strong vision of what the future could be like and it had a ton of online services, including ordering goods (and pizzas).
Sure, it needed time to gather steam. But the expression 'the writing was on the wall' applies: if you wanted to see it, you could have.
The problem with most business owners that are on to some kind of success is that they forget that everything has a beginning and an end, this goes for buggy whip makers just as much as it does for buggy whip store owners, if the automobile didn't get you then internet would have and if the internet had come along a little later then the pandemic would have. But somewhere in the 90's savvy business owners saw the shift and prepared. They're the ones doing very well today. The ones that decided to fight a rearguard action against the inevitable: not so much.
I'd love to know how Dutch urban planners overcame the automotive mindset after WWII. Resistance to the status-quo is fierce in the U.S. The former mayor of my city (which is considered very progressive) rails against even minor concessions to improving bike and pedestrian infrastructure. At our planning meetings, he counters any mention of the Netherlands with a loud "our city isn't Amsterdam!" and people go wild with applause. The pro-auto train of thought ends exactly there. It's as willfully ignorant as it is soul crushing.
Of course, some people were complaining can't get anywhere in the City anymore after a first redesign to a one way street model. But change is always criticized and the criticism soon died out. Sometimes it is the exact same people who now applaud such changes.
Maybe our multi party political system ( also in play at municipal level ) helps too.
> In the 1960s, Dutch cities were increasingly in thrall to motorists, with the car seen as the transport of the future. It took the intolerable toll of child traffic deaths – and fierce activism – to turn Amsterdam into the cycling nirvana of today
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...