One, aren't you rewarding bad behavior by staying in a suburban hotel, when ther are many, many great hotels, with no surface parking lots, in and around the Loop?! And two, I agree with two of your four bullet points. I think the first one needs to be nuanced, as in “Private parking lots must be utilized much more intensively”, and I think the last one needs to be discussed in much greater detail.

In most suburban areas, the office parking lot is used from 8 to 5, the restaurant parking lot is full from 5 to 8, the motel parking lot is full from 8 pm to 8 am and the church parking lot is only full on Sundays. Instead of one shared lot, we typically get four lots that are each empty at least two thirds of the time – change the utilization of each space from 5%-30% to 80% or 90% and you can reduce the number of spaces by a factor of three to five. It all gets back to zoning and development patterns – until we change the underlying assumptions, we're stuck with the existing patterns.

The whole issue of providing on-street parking, especially in suburan areas, gets back to two fundamental issues, traffic engineering and who pays for it? Traffic engineers, by definition, are interested in moving traffic quickly and safely. Many view parallel parking, or worse, angled parking, as creating conflicts to the smooth flow of traffic. Traffic engineers are also the ones who push for fewer curb cuts, but they're the ones that have the “standards” and get first crack at approving, or not, new street layouts. The other half of the equation is the cost of constructing and maintaining parking, be it added traffic lanes on the public right-of-way or in a private parking lot – somebody needs to pay for it – build it, sweep it, plow it and repair it – and most governments, supported by their voters, would rather push that responsibility onto the private landowner. Again, until we, as taxpayers, are willing to pay higher taxes to provide a significant increase in the amount of on-street parking, we're going to see a continuation of the existing model.

It's too bad that the focus is so utilitarian when designing urban infrastructure. Maybe if beauty were valued more in our public places we wouldn't need so much prozac. Spend less on gasoline and more on flowers, spend more on public art and pretty sidewalks and less on prozac.