You literally just assumed that millions of people would rather own a car but are forced not to instead of considering the possibility that some people simply don't want to drive.

That doesn't make me a car fetishist anymore than noticing that most people are religious makes me a believer in the afterlife.

What I'm actually saying, though, is far more benign, which is that just as many people would own a car in NYC as in Kansas City if it were equally convenient and inexpensive [0]. People (in general) don't choose public transit merely because it's convenient. They choose transit when it's more convenient than car ownership.

The flip side of this is that high car ownership rates aren't necessarily evidence of nonexistent or inadequate transit. Where car ownership is cheap and convenient, people almost universally choose to own a car (even if other options exist).

[0] Well, clearly not just as many. I don't like driving, either, and New York is attractive to me, too, because it enables that preference. But, still, consider that nearly half of all New Yorkers do own a car, despite how wildly inconvenient that is. Consider also that even in cities like Detroit and St. Louis something like 25% of people are carless, so there's some baseline level of poverty (even in very inexpensive cities) that prevents ownership. All of which is to say that a 50% ownership rate in NYC actually strikes me as pretty high (and as evidence, again, that people really will put up with a lot to keep driving).