Without wishing to sound flippant, as a society we've developed a mechanism to control the allocation of scarce resources - pricing. It sounds a lot like the parking you're describing is extremely underpriced, both in the demand/supply sense (demand is outstripping supply) and in the externalities sense (impacts to tourism, issues like air quality caused by traffic hunting for a space, walkability death spiral etc.)
For such a capitalist country as the US, the die-hard attachment to free or overcheap parking is really odd.
For such a capitalist country as the US, the die-hard attachment to free or overcheap parking is really odd.