Realistically, if there is literally nowhere to park your car, you either get rid of it, or you live somewhere else.
SF could do with much better public transit and many, many fewer parking spaces that aren't in a multi-story garage.
Only people who can afford endless impound
fees will "just park in the street".
When a university near me raised parking prices, any road or grass verge or dropping-off point on campus that wasn't marked 'no parking' got cars on it. When those were marked 'no parking', they started parking in the customer parking of nearby shops. When the shops restricted parking to two hours, people started parking on residential streets further out. So the residential streets needed a residents permit scheme.
Now, if parking is already extremely heavily regulated you might already have the street parking and customer parking and residents parking restrictions (and admin and enforcement for them) in place. But it's my experience that restricting the supply of parking spaces isn't always a simple matter.
If you build new housing without parking for new inhabitants, you don't have that inherent excess of cars per parking spot. You might have some excess still but not nearly as much.
The biggest solution though is to offer alternative transport, first, and then removing, reducing or making more expensive the parking infrastructure. Here in Amsterdam the city has been removing parking and hiking up parking fees quite rapidly. But it was after establishing ubiquitous, separated, safe cycle paths everywhere, a decent tram, bus system and metro, 8 train stations (in a city of just 1 million) and another relatively high-speed underground light rail project in the works today, as well as public-transport's rentable bicycles and mini electric cars (which, due to sharing, is getting iirc about ~20 users for the space of one traditional parking spot). In Amsterdam I've never owned a personal car and won't ever need to. But having lived in America, I can't imagine that to work.
I thought we were talking about major and not-so-major cities; areas where there are mandates to install X units of parking per Y units of new housing. In places like these, unrestricted parking is almost non-existent.
Where I reside, you can't park your vechicle more than 30 min. between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m.
Most towns I have lived in allow 72 hrs of parking, and then you need to move 300 yards. My town doesn't want to change the muni code because they make a staggering amount of Revenue.
Theses parking fines/traffic fines are revenue fueled. I honestly wouldn't be upset but these fees account for income level. They don't. You get a $38 dollar parking ticket, or a dubious $500 traffic violation--it's a setback for low income residents. Why couldn't you send in a copy of your 1040's, and have your parking violation adjusted to realistic amounts?
As to living, working, having a life, while living in the suburbs; you need a vechicle. You need to park the vechicle somewhere? Not all of us can just jump on public transportation(our public transportation is so slow, so spotty, I can get to most places in my county faster by riding my bike. (My employer doesn't like sweat soaked employees though, nor do Judges in Jury duty), or have the income to take Uber/Taxis everywhere.
My point is some of still need a automobile. Yes, we need parking rules. Fees/fines should not unreasonable? At least that's what I thought that constitution, the one one really cares about, said?
There are towns that use fines and citations as a source of revenue. If you live in one of those towns, and don't like the practice, agitate to have that practice changed. (Yes, I know that this is often somewhere between very goddamn hard and all-but-impossible.)
I am disinterested in responding to the rest of your comment. :)
Do make sure to compare the revenue from parking fees/fines against revenue from other sources (both similar in size and -say- the top five or top ten sources), as well as noting what fraction of the city's entire revenue is composed of parking fees and fines. The city is pretty clued-in, technologically speaking, so this information shouldn't be too hard to get.
I'm not required to do all the research you suggest, because I haven't made a comparative assertion. Most people who live in San Francisco own a car, most people who live in Manhattan do not. So it's not even remotely a fair comparison anyway. It's more expensive and dependent on parking than either Chicago or Los Angeles, but no doubt those cities can't just abandon parking without coming up with an alternative revenue stream.
I actually don't believe this. I could be cajoled into believing "Many people who live in SF own a car...", but not "Most people...". I bet if you look at the vehicle registration stats, you'll find that there are somewhere between 1/10 and 1/4 as many cars registered in the county as there are people living in it.
> I'm not required to do all the research you suggest, because I haven't made a comparative assertion.
You're never required to do anything. However, you actually did make a comparative assertion. You asserted:
> Yeah but SF makes a metric f ton of revenue off parking fees and fines. So they'd need to dramatically alter their revenue sourcing to get rid of parking spaces. [0]
That implies that parking fees and fines are a substantial portion of San Francisco's revenue. I don't care about the revenue streams of other cities. It would be nonsensical to look at them.
As I understand it, SF is a city with one of the highest per-capita city revenues in the US. I would be... rather surprised if parking fees and fines were largely responsible for its revenues. While fees and fines may bring in what appears to be a large amount of money, I expect that they account for less than 1% of city revenues. The only way to discover that is to compare them against the take from the rest of the city's revenue sources. :)