People who have been become accustomed to abundant free street parking will not be happy about paying for it. They will vote accordingly. You can complain that this isn't fair but that's the reality of living in a democracy.

I don’t think that’s actually true. There is certainly a very noisy minority that would like us to believe that they’re the majority, but revealed consumer preference does not seem to reinforce this statement.

Consider the street closures during the pandemic for outdoors eating. The parking crowd has screeched endlessly about the traffic and parking issues caused by this, but the majority of the populace love these areas now. A bunch of them are actually becoming permanent.

Similarly, the cute, street car suburbs with high walkability and insufficient parking are absurdly expensive everywhere I’ve ever lived. Turns out people like living places that are nice, and that sufficient parking is a relatively minor deciding factor.

No it's true. The street closures during pandemic were mostly in downtown commercial areas and were broadly supported by restaurant owners. They hardly impacted residential areas. Politicians who try to increase charges or reduce availability for residential street parking inevitably face a lot of resistance.

Building a new walkable neighborhood is fine. Trying to drastically alter an existing neighborhood is nearly impossible.

There are also examples from Europe where mayors have outright banned or drastically reduced access for cars, and won re-election over the complaints of car owners. And these aren’t podunk towns either, one of them is Paris.

Of course, the counter argument is “but Paris has a good metro system”, to which I say maybe we should fix that.

The state really wants its people to be as mobile and economically active as possible and cars facilitate exactly that.

Cars are actually one of the least efficient means of achieving that.

Sure, but only if your world begins and ends with the urban public transit map and only includes white collar workers. Outside of areas with good public transit cars are the next best thing, and those areas start much closer to urban cores than you want to admit and even within good transit areas there is a huge amount of economic activity where the point to point nature or cargo capacity of cars enables economic activity that is not otherwise economically in the black. We need to have some amount of car infrastructure to enable all that. A side effect of this is that a bunch of urban workers who don't really have a good argument for commuting by car can and do because they can afford the luxury.

It always amazes that the universal response to arguments about reducing parking in cities is that someone will immediately cry “well what about the country!” It’s always hard to come up with a response more polite than “I wasn’t talking about them, why are you bringing it up?”

It depends what you mean by efficient. A bus is more energy-efficient but a car is way more time-efficient.

They’re incredibly time efficient, until everyone else tries to do the same thing. This is why commutes in places like Atlanta and Los Angeles are notoriously bad.

Also, cars are literally the least space efficient means of transit ever devised. Depending on cars for transit means everyone has to live further apart in order to make roads and parking big enough to accommodate all the cars[0], making commutes worse.

Cars are also time inefficient over longer distances, trains (if we bothered to make them) and airplanes trivially beat cars.

0 - Underground parking solves the storage issue at a ludicrous cost. In many modern buildings the cost of the underground parking structure is often more than the cost of the apartment building above it.