> extraordinarily complex, expensive, and time consuming

Remove all zoning laws and it takes care of itself over time. Zoning is always "keep [thing people want] away from [place where people want it]".

All that accomplishes is putting services that people want further away from them.

Sure but one is a step in the right direction while the other adds a pile of shit on top of the existing pile of shit

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

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.

the first step, repainting lines on roads to add (ideally protected) bike/scooter lanes, is a large but imminently manageable project that can get done quickly. while that's happening, you direct various to favor bike/scooter parking over cars, perhaps introducing necessary legislation to that effect. the harder and longer changes are removing/reducing over-zealous zoning, deceptive environmental lawsuits, and overly-specified building codes. it won't happen in a few months, but a lot can happen in a few years for a motivated electorate.

>ideally protected

Very much the ideal. Unprotected bike lanes end up as parking for gig workers way too often.

There are ways to fix that, too, if we really wanted to.

For example, make it fully legal to do whatsoever you want to an unmanned non-emergency vehicle parked blocking a bike lane. Very soon an industry of car-destroyers would pop up producing amusing videos for everyone to watch.