The midtown Atlanta example is all wrong. Yes, there are a lot of cars in Atlanta. Yes, there are a lot of parking lots in Atlanta. Are these parking lots required to sustain these cars? Not at all. The rates for parking vary wildly, because people only want to park near where they are going.

Those parking lots are not for cars, they are for flipping real estate.

Real estate in midtown has been booming for a little over a decade as small run down buildings are demolished and 10 ~ 40 story skyscrapers are built. That means huge increases in land value, which attracts speculation. When a lot with a small building is purchased, what happens next? If the building stays, it will have to be serviceable, and a tenant found, which will lock the property up until the tenant leaves. So the building has to go, and the property might need to be re-zoned from single family residential.

If you pave over that lot, not only do you remove unwanted structures and get the opportunity to re-zone, there will be some low-maintenance passive income generated from people using the property to park their car.

So ultimately, those parking lots are good for the city in the long run. They're useless eyesores right now, but are more easily converted into high density buildings, as they have been doing for the last decade. In fact the real problem with midtown is that there has been too much high density construction too quickly, and not enough people have moved in yet.

So as much as I love a naval gazing rant, reality is a little more subtle, and a lot more complicated.