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