I never understood the residential parking permit argument anyway.
Public dollars built the road, which now contains public parking spots.
Implementing residential parking permits is a transfer of value from the public domain to private land owners.
In Palo Alto (and the rest of the Bay Area, where land owners are inherently millionaires), this constitutes a transfer of wealth from the public to the wealthiest few.
Where it snows, homeowners are on the hook to shovel the portion of the public sidewalk along their property.
It's not exactly unprecedented for municipal governments to treat the properties nearest infrastructure as more responsible for it than the rest of the city. It's not unreasonable that they then have preferential access to it.
An RPP program is a formalization of, "look, it'd be a waste for us all to build off-street parking when there's perfectly good street frontage here, let's agree to be reasonable and share the street frontage equally."
Of course it makes sense that would be the case. Inconsiderate people are likely not to care about encroaching on others' driveways when they or their guests leave their vehicles. They're also not likely to heed city leash laws, leaving their dogs deposit excrement randomly which neighbors tend to object to.
In some neighborhoods in town parking is a nightmare because there are not enough spaces on the street for visitors and residents. Institution of metered parking and permits was a price of success of urban redevelopment. Around here the residential permits aren't cheap, but most residents cough up the fee anyway. Even then there's no guarantee they will be able to find parking close to home, though the odds are improved and local dwellers say that's better than nothing.
Under the conditions operating here, I don't think there's a substantial "transfer of value" from public to private hands. It may be a different story in Palo Alto.
When presented with the true cost of driving, most people choose other modes. Driving and car ownership are ridiculously expensive once you realize how much you're paying for "free" parking (higher rent), "free" roads (higher taxes), and of course tens of thousands of dead people per year in the US alone. What we do now is largely force people to pay whether they drive or not, which of course encourages car ownership.
I mean, a helicopter would be a fun way to get to work but that doesn't mean we expect free helipads everywhere.
Easy. It becomes an endless source of parking ticket revenue for the city.
"Beautiful street you've got there. It'd be a shame if someone were to start parking on it. Every. Day."
I once observed that a few of my college-aged friends were subsisting on canned tomatoes and beans, and struggling to make ends meet. I suggested that they use my Costco membership to buy a months worth of supplies at once for roughly half to two-thirds or what they were spending. They patiently explained to me that part of why they lived this way was because they were already barely living within their means, which made acquiring two weeks worth of dining funds impossible (even if it meant "free" food for the rest of the month).
These fees are the kind of death-by-a-thousand-cuts that keep people in poverty.
If you never have much surplus money, you can rarely if ever do the things that save money in the long term. You can't invest in good clothes or household goods that might cost twice as much, but last more than five times as long as what you can afford, for example. You can't buy a freezer and stock up on food when it's on sale, or cook large cheap meals and freeze them to free up time later. Often, things like good benefits from banks and credit card companies are simply not available to you. Et cetera.
Obviously things like being unable to afford preventative health care and sort of health maintenance stuff like checkups and new glasses and so on can lead to much more expensive problems down the road. "Noncritical" health services like dental and vision are big things there. It's not like you can get a root canal or new glasses at the ER.
And it's very difficult to fight back against mistakes other people make that screw you over when you have few resources on hand. Problems with your bank? In my experience, if you have money a bank is a lot more likely to help you than if you're poor. I was treated a lot better when I had thousands of dollars in the bank than I am now, when I'm scraping by. And that's if you can even open a bank account at a reputable establishment at all. That is not a given.
Then there's renting vs owning property. Owning property isn't for everyone perhaps, but if you're handy and don't need to pay a professional to do everything the house needs, it's a lot cheaper to own than rent. Plus there's the general freedom you have on your own property vs rented property which opens all kinds of doors for saving money or just better quality of life in general.
Having money means you have the freedom to live very frugally by making smart choices and thinking long term. Not having money in the bank, free to spend on the right investments and opportunities, makes that enormously more difficult. And it's only getting worse with time.
Yes it was a pain having a lot of cars on the street but I didn't feel it was a hardship that I couldn't park in front of my house but occasionally (horrors) across the street.
As my passive aggressive neighbor put it, "well they can just buy a downtown permit. It's just a tax." So again, the minimum wage earners get the shaft. The discount permit for low earners is $100.
PS: my kid wants to buy up the extra parking permit allotment and offer them to folks parking the next street over.