[shiroiushi]

I don't think Amsterdam is a very good example. It's a very old city, similar to Manhattan NYC: it was built before cars (and coincidentally used to be named after Amsterdam centuries ago). So when they tried to go car-centric in the post-war period, it was basically a retrofit. Try driving around Manhattan and you have the same problem: roads are small and there's no parking. So going back to walkability isn't that hard: just rip out some of the larger roads and make things more bike- and walking-friendly like it used to be. All the buildings are close together anyway, so it all works.

Suburban/exurban America simply isn't like this: it was all built after the rise of the automobile. Trying to get people to ride bikes 15 miles to their nearest Walmart or Costco, because all the space between is filled with gigantic subdivisions full of big houses with big yards, isn't really feasible. Things are too far apart. So you can't just copy what Amsterdam did and expect it to work out. Manhattan could do it (and is doing it, slowly), and maybe a few other places mostly on the east coast, but other places not so much. Perhaps you could get more of this eventually if the US adopted Japanese-style zoning laws, but that would be very difficult to do because of the decentralized and local-first nature of lawmaking in the US.

[TylerE]

Another issue is the enclave-style construction of American neighborhoods. I live in the very very front of mine, with a bunch of commercial businesses just outside that are ~100-150ft away as the crow flies.

Unlike the crow, I can't trespass and hop a fence, so to get to these businesses that are "right there", I'd have to walk 0.7 miles, almost all of it with no sidewalks, and more than half on busy 4+ lane roads.

[anticensor]

Well, as a first stage transit, minibus lines could be set up to feed people to main streets that would have trams. A Sprinter minibus with 12 seats and 15 standing capacity is not that expensive.