There's NYC and there's NYC. Manhattan is a small part of NYC: Staten Island, you must have a car. Large swathes of Queens and even Brooklyn have no pub transport (buses can be pretty awful due to traffic although they do exist). I think that's a big block of people opposed. Another political consideration is that the State of New York has control over elements of policy that would otherwise be anti-car. For example, the congestion tax they wanted to bring in, it was the state government that killed that.

I still agree that congestion control, disincentives for car use, wider sidewalks, all should be done. Some of us wish NYC could declare independence so we could choose our own policy, but that's a different story...