This assumes that the purpose of a visit is retail shopping, which is in decline. Downtown use is shifting towards experiences (restaurants, coffee shops, etc) where lingering a while is an essential feature.
Even this idea of optimizing for visits over duration is flawed for retail shopping: not everyone has a specific item in mind and only that specific item in mind for a direct in/out purchase decision. So much of marketing is about impulse buys, and so much of consumer decision models are about wrestling with a wall of near but distinct variations of a product for that "perfect" one for a particular shopping. That's before you even get into the social models of retail where people shop together. Retail shopping benefits financially from time/lingering/"experiences" just as well as everything else and optimizing for "visits" maybe optimizing for the wrong things for even retail.
Arguably this is exactly part of why retail disappeared from many urban environments because suburban and exurban Malls were better at optimizing for lingering, social experiences in the 70s/80s.
The statement you are responding to does not assume the purpose of a visit is retail shopping. It doesn't matter what kind of business it is, it needs to make sufficient revenue, and unless the businesses start charging for lingering, they need to ensure enough customers are able to patronize the business to keep it going.
The point is a quantity over quality thing. People that linger/feel free to take their time are more likely to spend more in a lot of business classes. Optimizing for quantity of people spending money may be suboptimal for total revenue if each individual person spends less because they feel time pressured / aren't allowed to "window shop" / etc.
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.
The point of going to a restaurant or coffee shop is the atmosphere / venue for socialization; you would not do it if too tight a timeline were imposed.
Not at a lot of places I go to. I guess a place like Starbucks or McDonald's or Dunkin Donuts almost always (not always!) has a lot, but random restaurants and coffee shops that I go to generally don't.
