>Living without a car in those cities is severely limiting; I tried to do that in two of those and felt it was very difficult to buy groceries and get to work quickly and do easy recreation things on the weekend.
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 really not that hard of a line to draw. Can you enjoy all of the opportunities of city life without a car? Do most people not own a car? There's one city in the US where those answers are "yes".
Your line of reasoning reeks of Europe worship with a token exception for obfuscation purposes. There are tons and tons of people who live in places like Boston and SF and Chicago without cars and do not feel any worse off for doing so. I used to be one of them. I would go so far as to say these people can enjoy all the opportunities of city life. Are they a majority? Probably not. But that's mostly a figment of how these cities absorbed their urbanized suburbs in the 20th century.
Even Europe isn't car-free; sure, if you're a tourist and you visit Rome you can go all vacation without a car or even setting foot in one, but the people who live and work there often have (or want) a car. And there are things you just can't do in Rome without a car or car-adjacent (Uber, taxi, etc) such as some activity in the suburbs in the morning, cross town in the afternoon, and central in the evening.
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.
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.