> Amsterdam has plenty of suburbs, they just look different from US suburbs because of the different land-use and planning approach that they have in the Netherlands.
> But they've also invested a lot in their train network and most people commute that way.
Most people in say D.C. don't commute by train not because D.C. hasn't invested enough in it, but because the suburbs "look different." D.C., for example, has invested a ton in its train network. As I mentioned above, despite being a smaller city, D.C.'s subway has four times as many miles of track as Amsterdam's. But most people still commute by car, because D.C., like most U.S. cities, is only a small portion of its larger metro area. Washington, D.C. has under 700,000 people, but is just one part of a metro area of 5 million people. Amsterdam has over 850,000 people, and dominates its urban area of 1.6 million people.
That urban/suburban mix drives people to car use. Jobs in the D.C. metro area are scattered all over. For example, most of the technology jobs "in D.C." are actually in Virginia, e.g. Google is mainly in Reston, which is 25 miles outside the city. If you draw a 25-mile ring around Amsterdam, you'll mostly hit farmland. Around D.C., you're actually hitting many of the major population and economic centers in Virginia and Maryland.
The dispersed nature of the jobs makes building transit very hard. Reston has a train station. Many people opposed it, however, not because of "social disorder," but because it was a $6-billion project that wasn't useful to them. You see, the train really only goes to D.C. But not that many people go between Reston and D.C. Aside from a handful of yuppies who might want to live in D.C. and commute to Reston, people who work in Reston drive in from Ashburn or Great Falls, or one of the other nearby suburbs. There is no rail network that connects these places, nor would it be practical to build one.
Building cities around cars didn't just result in people who are conditioned to drive rather than take transit. It created patterns of housing and employment that make it really hard to build transit after the fact. Fairfax County, a suburban county to the west of D.C., has more residents and almost as many jobs as D.C. itself. But the rail system is designed to get people from Fairfax County into D.C.--it does nothing to get people to all the jobs located in Fairfax County.
Loudon County, still further west from D.C., has almost half of D.C.'s population. There is no rail in Loudon. Nor would extending rail from D.C. be all that useful. Only 10,000 people from Loudon commute to D.C. (and almost nobody does the reverse commute). Meanwhile,65,000 commute to Fairfax County. Another 31,000 commute to another county within 20-40 miles. Try convincing people in Loudon to spend the money to build rail into D.C. when it would only benefit 10% of the commuters.