I would also argue that pedestrian friendly depends a lot on when the city was built.

If you look at the US, the old (by American standards) cities like Boston, NYC, are pretty car-free friendly. Same with the cores of European cities which are much older.

The further west you go, the newer the city and the more they are designed around having a car.

This is true in the US but not a law a nature. Its the result of policy. There are whole cities built from scratch (outside the US) within the last 70 years that did not choose this model. And there are many new developments in older cities all over the world that reject the "car-only" model. There is no unstoppable flow of history at work here. It's politics and policy.