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When I visited NYC a few years ago, I used the trains and the subway extensively to travel around, and did not encounter any major problems while doing this or see anything that would have been expectionally different from doing the same in Helsinki (well, apart from the greater general diversity, of course). Is NYC different from the other major American cities?
Yes. Because of, I'm pretty sure, parking.
Once a system gets bad enough, everyone with resources or agency stops using it, and then stops caring about it, leaving nobody who can effectively advocate for improvement. But, of course, this can only play out if there's a viable alternative. In most cities, cars are that alternative, even despite traffic. People are evidently willing to sit in horrible stop-and-go traffic in order to avoid using even mildly unpleasant mass transit.
What they're not willing to do, apparently, is sit in horrible stop-and-go traffic and then have to spend 45 minutes looking for an on-street parking space that might end up being half a mile from their destination. That's the situation in NYC, which, unusually for the US, has no parking space minimums for businesses or residences and so effectively has zero free parking lots. If you want to practically substitute car travel for subway travel in NYC, you need to take Uber everywhere or use paid lots. Either option is sufficiently expensive (easily upwards of $10K/year) that even most of the upper middle class opts for the subway.
It's worth keeping an eye on this, because self-driving cars could completely disrupt it, either by dropping taxi prices 50% or more or by allowing cars to drop off their owners and then go find parking on their own.
Impossible. There just isn't enough road capacity to replace the NY subway system. Traffic in NYC is merely painful now, but that's because the subway exists and most people use it. If everyone tried to move to cars -- even assuming the parking problem away with self-driving rideshares -- the roads would become jammed to the point of complete dysfunction.
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Also, the NYC subway and transit system is sufficient, and the city is dense enough, that a majority of New Yorkers don't own a car. Once you have a car, the marginal cost of a trip drops by a lot (although it's still probably higher than people intuitively expect, once you account for wear and tear, insurance, maintenance, etc). But if you can get by without owning a car at all, that's a big fixed cost you can avoid, and it encourages you to take transit for marginal trips.
Maybe, although congestion is so bad that it still might not be worthwhile. I've been in a NYC bus that was slower than walking in between stops, and reducing the price of a cab ride just makes this problem worse.
Plus, of course, you won't have to worry about your car being stolen/vandalized/broken into.
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