I grew up in Vienna, VA, where you needed a car even if you lived around the Metro station, because the town decided to surround it with low-density residential instead of high-density mixed residential/retail: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Vienna%2FFairfax-GMU+Stati.... In contrast, I lived in a relatively affordable New York suburb,[1] where the Metro North station was surrounded by a mix of retail and residential: https://www.google.com/maps/place/New+Rochelle,+NY/@40.90929.... My wife and I had a car, and a baby, and we used the car only once a month because even the Costco was right next to a nearby Metro North stop.
People used to post-WWII suburbs really fail to realize how much government policy distorts peoples' choices. My house in Annapolis (which is at the edge of rural Anne Arundel county) is in a neighborhood where you can walk to a park, a bar, and two quickie marts. The subdivision was built about the same time as Vienna (in the car era), but back then the county had much smaller minimum lot sizes, less than a third the current minimum lot size in the county. The streets are barely wide enough for one car to drive through. That's how people choose to live when you don't force development into a sprawling wasteland model.
[1] It wasn't substantially more expensive than Vienna, despite being within a 30 minute train ride of Midtown Manhattan.