Oh man, I hear you. I worked in a government place in Ottawa that was a lot like this. There were big commercial parking lots across the street selling daily or monthly spaces, but the guys in my section mostly left their cars on the 1-hour-parking streets and spent the whole day keeping track of whether the enforcement guy had been by and telling each other that the tires had been chalked. Draw your own conclusions about government jobs.

It was probably another example of the classist nature of that workplace as the scientists mostly bussed or paid for parking, but the technicians mostly played tag with the officers. The occasional scientist who got along with the technicians would leave his car on the street and trust the technicians to warn him. People from the suburbs often took the bus/transitway; the street-parkers were mostly rural residents who took a lot of pride in Living in the Country and claimed to have no alternatives to driving but never carpooled either.

I had a car when I worked there, but I mainly just brought it to work when I had car-errands at lunchtime. It used to annoy me to pay the daily rate twice, so I sometimes played parking-ticket-tag too, and probably paid more per month than just paying two daily rates.