You can have streets which are car-friendly (for exceptional or emergency purposes where you need the car) by getting rid of all frivolous car use. There's no feasible alternative, because congestion always destroys car-friendliness except in very sparsely populated areas. And you can only eliminate that congestion by promoting more scalable alternatives to the use of private motor vehicles.
I hadn't visited Madrid in over 20 years, and found the burial of the M30 (and, increasingly, the radial highways) extremely impressive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrid_Río
There's also the subway (impressive sprawl, infrastructure itself not so much), and decent buses.
Plenty of areas have also been closed to car traffic.
I'm all for restricting traffic, but it doesn't need to be completely either-or, even in a larger city.