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Notes -
Looking at Table 3 in this Census report you could argue that NYC is the only "actual" city in America: the only large city where the majority of commuters use public transport. (Focusing on commuters makes the most sense to me - if you need a car to get to work then you need a car, and if you don't then you're probably fine in general since you probably have many more options for most needs and amenities than you do for your workplace.)
I'd use a slightly more expansive definition than "majority", though. Chicago's at 28%, for instance, which is pretty impressive, and that also gets us San Francisco, DC, and Boston. If we go down to a nice round 25% we also get (just barely) Philadelphia and Seattle. Miami, though? 8%? That's worse than LA! I'll take your word for it that Miami has a car-free-friendly zone, but it must be a very local one?
Your definition seems fair enough to me. Though I think a city can have a zone that’s urban even if most of the city is car.
Chicago is a bit odd because the City has a large amount of land within its zone. It’s a big reason why its per capita murder rate isn’t that high but it has a few neighborhoods with crazy amount of murder. It urban core is quite big where you can walk to work, church, Whole Foods, theatre and job within a 20 min walk. That’s probably about 10 sq mile zone.
Someone gave a tool for estimating population size. Brickell you can do that. The Miami zone it says is 200k people which feels smaller than the people I think live there. I threw out 500k for the size of the zone and would agree Miami is small for that. Miami is a little light on employers if your not Spanish speaking but it’s definitely possible to work at Citadel and have a full social life and never do anything farther than a 20 min walk.
When I’ve visited sun belt cities I can’t remember any full walkable neighborhoods. NYC is probably the only city that is entirely city. I think half a dozen perhaps a few more have a core of 200k-1m that fits the definition.
As far as I know Houston, Phoenix, and Dallas have zero car free neighborhoods and I tend to think LA is fairly limited.
My highly scientific attempt at drawing a 5 km radius around the walkable urban areas of candidate cities:
Edit: What we really need is someone with access to Walk Score to cross-reference it with the Global Human Settlement Layer using some kind of clustering algorithm.
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