Both of those articles are a good illustration of my point actually, sensational conclusions drawn from reports that don't take into account the dramatic differences between the cities being compared. In this case, NYC is so enormous that it's in another weight class where the benchmarks we're being presented are highly flawed in context.

For example, the commute time piece in Fortune isn't looking at metro area, only intra-city commute time. NYC having the longest average commute makes for an interesting data point and it's technically true, but it doesn't take into account the fact that the city of New York has an extremely large land area spread across several islands with a population that dwarfs most of the cities on that list. Considering how the data for NYC is influenced by situations like the non-trivial number of Staten Islanders who commute 1 to 2 hours a day to Manhattan (still intra-city) via ferry + subway, the 31.5 minute average commute time in SF doesn’t look so good. Painting these pictures with the same brush is an effort in futility, the same standards just don’t apply