So many comments in here using the context of US cities and missed that Amsterdam (like most big european cities) is not designed for high throughput car transportation and as a result painting that decision as making things "crazy slow" and that it "sounds terrible". I highly encourage you to go live a week in a big old european city (Paris, London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Madrid) without renting a car to understand why…
Amsterdam notably was designed for cars in the 70s afaik, but they consciously redesigned it over time. So I’m a few decades, it could be your American city.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jokinen_Plan
But not until they did quite a bit of damage, some of which remains today. If that idiot had had his way a lot of the historical city would have been destroyed.