Really? I lived in Seattle and didn't need a car for daily use. I also highly suspect you don't need one in Chicago, Washington DC, maybe Philly and Pittsburgh. And you definitely don't need one in most parts of NYC, not just Manhattan (I know plenty of people who live in Queens and commute by train).
I didn't say that you need a car to live in Seattle. I said that commute times are not necessarily shorter.
Besides, where did you work when you lived in Seattle? Plenty of people live in the city, but work across the lake in one of the offices in Eastside (Microsoft in Bellevue, Redmond or Samammish, Google in Kirkland etc).
You don't need a car in a sense that you can take a bus, or the private connector shuttle if your employer provides one. But they sit in the same traffic jams on the roads, so it's not really saving you any time (although you do get the benefit of reading or doing something else while waiting).
