The attractive city centers have nice stuff, but too few people who live within walking distance to keep them in business and in good shape. They need a way to bring in suburbanites and visitors to supplement the native population.
Also, a lot of cities have too many and/or too wide lanes, which makes drivers feel too safe driving unsafe speeds. You can use parking to "eat up" the extra space and make the street feel more crowded, which will make drivers slow down and drive a lot more carefully.
So street parking should absolutely not be seen as just a negative thing, it can serve a very useful function in the layout of a street.
The solution was to remove two lanes of traffic, forbid street parking, add a bike lane along each side of the road, and add a centre turning lane. this was all done with just paint and "no parking" signage. There was a bit of complaining about the loss of street parking, but other than that it's worked out great, and I actually see people using the bike lanes now, and traffic actually flow smoother.
Makes a lot of sense really
It’s a pretty good solution for medium-sized cities, but it breaks down as population increases. Toronto has largely stopped building these garages because they’ve run out of room for them after immense population and ridership growth.
Toronto is a pretty big though, so it’s still a solution worth exploring for medium-sized cities that can still reasonably build these facilities.