Perhaps we're getting hung up on the semantics of "replaced." Where once there were horses, there were later internal combustion vehicles of many kinds. But the point the article makes is simply that that "replacement" wasn't as direct as the typical claim, as urban workers were not commuting on horseback. People did not ride into the dealership in a personal carriage, trade in the horses, and drive off the lot in a Model T. At that time, communities were denser and people were walking and using transit. Some of the transit was pulled by horses, later replaced by individual cars as the auto industry systematically attacked transit and reshaped cities, but that's not what the "replaced" claim implies. It has the sound of a 1:1 swap.