Parking is free on Saturdays during the holiday season here in the urban hellhole (it's not as if on street parking is actually expensive any other time). Maybe this policy made sense decades ago when they were desperate to attract shoppers from the suburbs, but now the problem is that...there isn't much on street parking (at least in dense retail areas). So free parking tells people they should drive in and then they circle around and cause traffic jams and get pissed off that there is nowhere to park (much more than just paying a few bucks would bother them if they could find a spot). The best you can say about the free parking policy is that it doesn't really encourage that many more people to drive in, but if not then what's the point?
Transit, of course, is not free.
