Cars improve the lives of drivers with increased range movement, more time independent movement (start your journey when it suits you, not when a timetable allows you to) and allow for more freight to be carried.
When cars are criticized for bringing down the quality of life it is mostly an issue in urban environments. People in rural or suburban areas rely heavily on cars. The car may even have saved the quality of life in rural areas (ie stopped/slowed down the flight from those areas into cities) while it's what makes the existance of modern suburbia possible. It therefor provides cheaper housing and a broader choice of how you want to live (Not everybody needs five starbucks and a movie theatre in the neighbourhood). They also slowed the population increase of cities.
Adding costs to drivers in urban areas mean higher burdens for people that have to commute by car, since suburban/rural areas are too thinly populated to allow for efficient public transportation.
The quality of life argument often tends to demonize technological progress and romanticizes the past. The funny thing is, that this romance is only possible because technologies provided us with spare time. So did motorization. People who lived back then, would have always opted for the new technologies.
That being said, cars do decrease urban quality of life in certain ways. But it is important to not let generalization allow for bad policies. Light Rail for instance is alwas proposed, while it costs more than individual motorized traffic and while rail tracks usually decrease nearby quality of life more than any road could.
I'd propose simpler measures:
1) stop providing free parking. Allow the parking space usage to be priced at what the value of that land would have provided in real property taxes, if it had been tilled with a house. There's an interesting book about the "cost of free parking" by an UCLA Professor http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf
2) get rid of cab driving restrictions to dramatically lower cab fair prices. cities with limited amounts of cab driving licenses have higher fair costs. A NY cab medallion is considered a better investment than gold http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-31/ny-cab-medallions-w...
3) If property owners where to decide, they'd propably opt more likely for narrowing the streets and expanding sidewalks as it would increase their properties value. BID (business improvement districts) often do this. Enable more owners to make those decisions.
4) start with yourself and ditch your car if you don't need it. Do you really need more range? Do you really need to be able to start your journey every minute and not just every 10 minutes. And do you always need to be able to haul up to 4 fridges? And thus do
5) car sharing. i'm a very satisfied user of http://www.car2go.com/ and similar services.
6) if there's a growing need for light-rail, chances are, this need could have already been eliminated by using more buses for public transport.