I'm not sure I even understand what your point is now.
Public spending tries to account for quality all the time. Quality "metrics" of various sorts exist in lots of places and can always be evaluated (or found, then evaluated, as may often need to be the case) when making trade-offs.
In the case of public parking, there are ways to improve "quality" by reducing overall parking pressure at specific locations by "moving" it to other areas, such as park-and-ride combinations with public transportation, improving access to site-to-site ground transportation (bicycles, scooters, wheelchairs, segways, what have you), and just improved public transportation in general.
Quantity is often an easier metric to optimize for because it's always a number, but that's all the more reason for public spending to find ways to do the hard thing and optimize for quality. That's why we elect people to work on hard problems and care so much about public spending.
Define quality. It's all great to say that quality matters, but you're using an abstract definition of quality while letting everyone fill in their own mental definition of quality. That feels good, but is is a terrible way to actually make the concrete decisions about how the public purse will be used.
There was nothing abstract in my definition of quality. I defined quality directly in terms of things that matter to net revenue of local businesses several times in the above posts and gave several examples (such as perceived time pressure versus ability to window shop or impulse buy).
I don't see how that is a terrible way to make concrete decisions about public spending, and I'm very not sure why you are arguing that it is. Quality can certainly be defined and optimized for, and that's precisely what I've said, and provided specific examples for. I even admitted that optimizing for quality is hard, but just because something is hard doesn't make it impossible to make concrete decisions about.
Public spending tries to account for quality all the time. Quality "metrics" of various sorts exist in lots of places and can always be evaluated (or found, then evaluated, as may often need to be the case) when making trade-offs.
In the case of public parking, there are ways to improve "quality" by reducing overall parking pressure at specific locations by "moving" it to other areas, such as park-and-ride combinations with public transportation, improving access to site-to-site ground transportation (bicycles, scooters, wheelchairs, segways, what have you), and just improved public transportation in general.
Quantity is often an easier metric to optimize for because it's always a number, but that's all the more reason for public spending to find ways to do the hard thing and optimize for quality. That's why we elect people to work on hard problems and care so much about public spending.