To be perfectly honest, although it's technically possible to go car-free here, it can be more trouble than it's worth. You'll be able to get to the essentials

To be perfectly honest, although it's technically possible to go car-free here, it can be more trouble than it's worth. You'll be able to get to the essentials easily enough, but there are a long tail of places that you may want to get to which are only bus-accessible if you transfer- and that can add a ton of time to your trip. It's more realistic to think of Seattle as a city where you can be "car-light": it's entirely possible to go without driving during the week, assuming you commute by bus and have a small supermarket nearby to pick up dinner/essentials. Then, on the weekend, a vehicle can be super useful to fill in the gaps, whether that's going to the larger supermarket for bulkier goods, getting out of the city into nature, or going over to a distant neighborhood to check it out. Part of this is because of the city's geography- I might not mind (for instance) living in West Seattle and commuting by bus to downtown, but if I'm trying to go visit the Woodland Park Zoo up, I'd probably want to drive there because it would be a considerably longer trip involving a transfer in Downtown.