Parking laws did, pretty much, fall from the sky one day on a bunch of stone tablets, usually reflecting terrible data. if you want to read 750 pages on the top

Parking laws did, pretty much, fall from the sky one day on a bunch of stone tablets, usually reflecting terrible data. if you want to read 750 pages on the topic, read Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking. They usually are designed to produce neighborhoods where no one ever needs to spend any time searching for a free parking space— which leads to a great deal of suffering for anyone not in an automobile, since such neighborhoods have vast expanses of surface parking that are completely inhospitable to human beings, and are very difficult to serve with public transit. They also often require an amenity that is very expensive to produce (parking spaces, especially structured spaces) be provided for free, which incentivizes people to own cars and drive everywhere— exactly what we don't want in urban areas, since cars pollute a lot, are dangerous, and require huge amounts of scarce land to store and transport.