> This is also NYC which is considered a model city for public transport.
It is? By who?
NYC has probably the best public transportation in the US, it's true. But the US is known for generally having awful public transportation.
> What are you supposed to do if you like to take trips to places hundreds of miles away? What if your job involves visiting many different locations in your city throughout the day?
It depends. For longer trips, trains or planes, combined with bike/walk/transit at the end will work. For visiting many locations, well it depends on how far apart they are, what you're doing, how good the bike/transit setup is, etc. Here in Germany, you see people from companies (I think including DHL?) delivering things via electric cargo bike.
Of course, in some cases, a car is the right answer. Few people actually want to ban cars entirely from cities, as there are some uses, like business deliveries, emergency vehicles, and vehicles for the handicapped, where they're difficult to replace. And cars are less of a problem for long distance trips than they are in space-starved urban areas.
But the truth is that US cities near universally push cars as the dominant mode of transport, to the detriment of other means. This is less true in NYC than elsewhere, but even there, there are very few protected bike lanes, and walkability can be hampered still by wide roads full of fast moving cars.
Cars have some upsides and necessary uses, but they also have downsides: expensive for the government to support, expensive for the user, space-inefficient, very loud, polluting, and dangerous to others. It's long past time their allocated space was slimmed down in favor of supporting public transit, walking, and biking more.