Thanks for your reply. This is an interesting perspective, but not one I find convincing, because (1) the orders of magnitude don't line up, and (2) providing free street parking in order to ticket people who do it wrong is a very roundabout way for a cash-strapped municipality to raise money.

To explain (1) a little more: the FY2019 budget shows that the city spent, and raised, 65 billion dollars in that year, making the $713 million of parking revenue slightly more than a 1% drop in that bucket. If using the space for small parks, or trash collection, or additional pedestrian space increased land values even 3% then the property tax revenue alone would more than make up for the missing ticket revenue (even if we assume that all of that ticket revenue is from free-parking side streets, which is pretty unlikely).

For (2), the best way to get money out of parkers is very likely not letting them park for free and then ticketing for street sweeping violations or parking too near a hydrant. The best way is to charge for the privilege of storing your vehicle on a city street. A spot in a garage in Manhattan usually costs around $800 a month, or 9.6k per year. Why should such a valuable commodity be offered free for those lucky enough to find on-street parking?

Again, thanks for your response. I was surprised to see how much revenue parking tickets raised, and this was a good stress-test of my proposition!