Bike lanes and other non-car infrastructure? Good luck using them. Between police and other supposed city workers parking wherever they want with (often fake) placards to mopeds and ebikes going 20+ mph in the wrong direction, biking and walking in NYC is simply not the enjoyable experience it ought to be. Traffic enforcement might as well not exist - anyone can drive around with a paper plate from Texas or drive however they’d like because NYPD refuses to enforce traffic laws.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
But yes, the Subway is criminally underfunded (it's ran by the State of NY actually). Nonetheless, despite how bad NY is, it's still the best in the US.
Minneapolis has a decent network: https://go.minneapolismn.gov/final-plan/bicycling/all-ages-a... (but of course you have snow half the year).
Cars are very useful, and they even exist in Europe; the reasonable best one ca do is work out a non-car commute and use it less - but it is possible to be entirely car free in many American cities (especially if you're willing to be in a smaller town that you can literally walk across).
You absolutely can live without a car in a lot of these cities but if and only if you want to bike. If you want to ride a lot of public transit it's gonna suck.
What you can't do is do it in a trendy way that "befits your tax bracket" so to speak and prevents the white collar types from looking at you like you're inferior when you bike lock your cargo bike to the lamp post beside the liquor store.
As for bigger cities, you absolutely can live without a car in Boston, DC, SF, Atlanta, Chicago, and the list goes on but toward the bottom it's gonna require more biking and less public transit.
The only city in the US where you can live in most neighbourhoods and not be limited without a car is NY.
And all of those cities you mentioned are significantly larger (600-800k).
So now we're just splitting subjective standard of living hairs? I think we can all agree that living car free in Manhattan is fine and living car free in nowhere Idaho is not but drawing a line in the middle always just turns into a dumb circle jerk.
>It's not even practical to stay out late in many of those cities.
That's mostly because people who think they know how other people should live don't want the bars open all night and in cases where that's not politically possible to just decree they screw with other things they can effect like public transit schedules.
It's all about working with what you have available, not dreaming what could be available - would it be nice if there was a train stop half a block from my house that just happened to go exactly where I wanted? Sure! Is that going to happen? Unlikely, unless I change other things in my life to make it so.
Vehicles/cars per capita:
Europe: .56
Japan: .49
USA: .83
Gibraltar: 1.44