I agree. But this is a natural disadvantage in comparison to both rideshare services (no one has to worry about parking) and shared mobility (leave your bike/scooter wherever). US cities often don't want to provide the spaces because it means less revenue, more work, and disincentive to use the public transit they fund.
Free parking is now a significant policy hill to die on for a loud, politically vocal portion of the population, even in places like NYC where they are a minority. Any giveaway of free parking, whether it be for dedicated carsharing spots, a bike corral, a bus lane, to free up spots by making people pay for usage, or to reduce double parking by delivery vehicles, is equivalent in these peoples’ eyes as personally driving a bulldozer to eminent domain their living room, despite the fact that the street is a notionally public realm. And at the scale of local elections with such low turnout that margins are measured in the hundreds of voters, pissing these people off is something you do at your own peril.
Some jurisdictions, as it is, do not spend nearly enough money on street maintenance and upkeep, and changing parking is a fear that other issues will pop up and be ignored.
And in some cities, streets are actually not managed by the city but by the state, and good luck getting a state DOT to do anything even a hairline outside of the box.
> Some jurisdictions, as it is, do not spend nearly enough money on street maintenance and upkeep
There's an interesting tension there. I imagine that paving and maintaining streets wide enough to allow for free street parking is a massive drain on the city's street budgets. And, considering that, in my city, an annual on-street parking permit costs about the same as 1 week of off-street parking on the private market, it's probably being provided at a massive discount just on the basis of land value alone.
Combine the two, and it would seem that you've got what amounts to an absolutely massive taxpayer-supported hand-out. Which I could swear is exactly the kind of thing that Americans are supposed to hate the most.
Paving them costs money, and maintenance does, but that implies that proper maintenance is being done.
Most cities are far behind on maintenance on many of their roads. Modifying the free parking might also result in people asking to fix the other things wrong with the road, and before you know it you're Seattle spending $12M per mile to reconstruct the road from curb to curb. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/12-...
