THE BEST THING FOR THE GOVERNMENT TO DO IS GO AWAY.

Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn lays it out in "Cities Can't Be About Moving Cars."  Part of his essay involves push-back from between people skeptical about government except when it involves road socialism.  Read that part there.  I'll focus on the main positive points he raises.

Central planners, lacking humility and perspective, created an overly simplistic set of zoning regulations and imposed them on cities. These included regulations on parking, some of the most inflexible, yet baseless, rules in the package.

These regulations have, among other things, resulted in a development pattern that costs more to service and maintain than it generates in local wealth and tax capacity. The results are higher taxes, more debt, reduced services, and local governments that are fundamentally insolvent. We need local governments to be smart and thoughtful servants of the people in their community, but insolvent governments tend to do dumb and desperate things. They tend to develop a rivalrous, predatory mindset with the populations they serve.

In addition, parking regulations hurt small businesses while strengthening the position of corporations and franchises. They limit the options of families, force burdens on churches, schools, and other civic institutions, and impair property rights without a justifiable nexus. They are universally a net negative, yet local governments cling to them, largely for the arbitrary empowerment parking regulations provide.

That's the short form of Donald Shoup's case against free parking.  I could add "opportunities to grift" to that "arbitrary empowerment," although that ought be self-evident.  If you have transportation options (meaning you live in a higher-order central place, there's more than zoning and planning at work here) the land-owner is probably a better judge of how many parking spaces to provide than somebody casting runes over a planning manual.

[M]y options increase the more parking spaces are eliminated and replaced with something else. Fill that parking lot in the downtown with a new restaurant and I’ve got another place to go. Take out some parking spots and expand seating and now that restaurant can serve more people, maybe expand their offerings, maybe be open more evenings. That’s all good. Add more homes to my neighborhood and there are more patrons for all this new stuff, all within easy walking distance, none of them requiring a parking spot.

All that zoning and mandating creates a one-size-fits-all land use pattern that doesn't suit Mr Marohn, and it probably frustrates a lot of people who don't have a background in traffic engineering, urban planning, or regional economics.

[D]riving in my city is way nicer than driving in the neighboring suburb. Sure, I never go over 30 miles per hour, but I can get everywhere really quickly. It’s not about speed; it’s about travel time. With gridded streets I’ve got lots of options for how to get somewhere.

When I’m forced to drive out to the edge of town, I’m continually frustrated by the way the roads have been engineered to maximize speed at the expense of my time. High speeds mean lots of traffic signals with long intervals. If I hit them green, great, but I seemingly never hit them green and so I spend lots of time going nowhere. Every car is channeled to the same places, so I’m always driving in congestion, even in off-peak times. And every destination is separated, so I can see where I want to go but it’s a five-minute circuitous trip to get there. The system treats me like an idiot and I find the entire experience demeaning and frustrating.

When you attempt to provide residents with quasi-private streets, you end up funnelling all the purposeful trips onto the stroads, and maltimed traffic lights are as common as those air-powered waving men.  Apparently the Radburn plan of Milwaukee's Wedgewood Park neighborhood never caught on, and now everyone suffers.

If the idea was to provide easier access to the centers of higher-order central places for people living in the exurbs, well, that didn't work out so well either.

[A]bout the only place that isn’t quick and convenient to drive in my city is when I am forced to cross the highway that runs through the middle of it. That is where all the suburban dumb creeps in, from traffic signals that waste my time to being forced to drive six blocks out of my way to travel one block.

That highway is there not because of me. It is there to accommodate people who live outside of the city. For some reason (and I don’t understand this) there is a commonly held belief that the lives of people living in cities is somehow dependent on people who live outside of cities. For urban spaces to be successful, people who prefer to live in suburban areas need to be able to drive quickly through our neighborhoods and then conveniently park within feet of whatever destination they choose.

My life would be way better if that highway went away. If we turned it back into the grid, made it function like nearly all our other streets, I’d have even more options. Way more options along with a much higher quality of life.

Not only that, my city would be far more prosperous. Replace those parking lots with other things and the tax base goes up substantially. Reduce the amount of pavement and drainage we are providing and our costs go down substantially. Give me more options and my property value goes up. Get rid of that highway and I’d have lower taxes, better services, along with more family wealth. Why would I not want this?

Here's where that nasty bid-rent curve gets in the way.  On the one hand, rent gradients are steeper if transportation costs are higher; as a consequence there's "no affordable housing" downtown.  On the other hand, if transportation costs are lower, rent gradients are less steep, but the affordable housing is still at a distance.  It's likely, though, that land markets subject to fewer zoning and parking constraints will allocate resources more efficiently than the outcome the Wise Experts have saddled us with.