NYC is quite car-centric by international standards. Compare to London (or Paris, or lots of other places), which in response to COVID has:

* Used congestion pricing as a tool to reduce pollution/returning traffic/mode-shift to cars

* Shut off large areas of their city to cars

* Rapidly built pedestrian/bike networks to accommodate for non-car movement

While NYC has:

* Indefinitely postponed congestion pricing

* Defunded bike safety and public transit improvement initiatives

* Not built any cohesive bike or pedestrian systems to encourage non-car transport

Of course in pre-COVID times, NYC severely lagged in both pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure/investment, and famously has some of the most expensive public-transit construction costs in the world.

re: car-centric cities, agreed that somewhere like Nashville is not going to have these kinds of problems. However, a large swath of Americans live in public transit or carpool-reliant cities (NYC/SF/Seattle/DC/Chicago/Southern California, many large southern cities). Mode-shift to private transit would increase traffic 10-20+% in most of these places, which I think we can all agree is not ideal for pollution, gridlock, parking needs, public health, etc.

NYC public transit usage is more similar to Paris or London than it is to any of the cities you listed. 56.5% of New Yorkers commute with public transit (2015), seems pretty on par with European standards to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_high_...

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/10/riding-bikes-...

NYC did legalize e-bikes at the start of all this, a step in the right direction.