A parking structure costs about $28,000 per car. That would be in most cases one person. So the city might as well spend the money on building some apartment public housing and just have the people live in the space. The other alternative is to build some proper public transit. For $28,000 per potential user, you can built quite a bit of that. You might even built it to the outskirts of the city and built a massive conventional parking lot.

The cars still have to get to the parking structures, which means they fuck up traffic anyway by forcing the surrounding streets to be turned into car sewers.

The downtown for our little city (just under 300,000 people) has multiple parking structures and a ton of parking lots within a few minutes walking distance from everything in the area. They sit empty.

Why? Because people "NEED" on-street parking and will bitch if they don't get it. So what should be quiet streets or roads with bike lanes just becomes rows upon rows of people parking there.

And then we gift motorists with free parking around the holidays, further clogging up public spaces.

The solutions are so easy, but either a lack of will from leadership, or the entitlement of NIMBYs, makes it very difficult to achieve an outcome that works for everyone.

The general urbanist consensus is that parking structures are a good idea sometimes.

Basically, if you are trying to revitalize your downtown, a government owned parking garage can function as a replacement for parking outside existing shops. This way, a previously walkable downtown can drastically reduce its existing parking while still accommodating a largely motorist clientele.

On the other hand, they are a less good idea in already dense and valuable urban centers. Urban parking lots are already expensive. Urban parking garages are enormously expensive. And they are counterproductive to the aim of getting people out of their cars and getting them to take transit into and around downtown. Especially in larger cities, the case for public parking garages is fairly difficult to make, since if an area is popular enough to justify a parking garage, the land for the parking garage could probably be put to better use in the form of a public park, housing, or businesses. And if a parking garage is truly needed, then a private developer could build one and turn a profit.

The problem is that probably the best place for parking garages in a city would be at a popular transit stop near the urban/suburban divide, to serve as a transition point between auto oriented and transit oriented commuters. But if you built a transit stop at the urban/suburban divide then hopefully that area will be experiencing infill quite quickly, and transit ridership will access the network via foot. Meanwhile, if you build a transit station far out... why build a parking structure, which is expensive, when you could build surface parking, which is cheap? And as a bonus, surface parking can be sold off easily to developers so they can build housing, whereas parking structures would require significant retrofitting to fit this need.

Yeah, several multi-floor parking buildings around the edges of the downtown area where people can park, then take public transit to move around.

the city didn't do this. No city would build a big parking lot with walls in the middle if it.