Every single change to a city of any reasonable size is exactly that hot fix, even if it takes months or years to implement (see: Big Dig). Desiring grand unified "fix everything" projects rarely works wonders, whereas small-scope projects over time can improve things. In many suburbs just building sidewalks and bike paths would improve things tremendously.
It's like hotfixing a completely broken pile of spaghetti code in prod, it'll save your sunday evening but you're in for 6 months of rewrite anyways