Cities usually handle residential parking through on-street parking management and off-street parking requirements. The two may affect one another but are frequently managed independently. This paper focuses on residential on-street parking management often executed through residential parking permit programs. We present the relatively scarce literature and survey various tools used by cities around the globe. We discuss the political explosiveness of the programs’ implementation and highlight the research gap on the subject, whose closing may help promote more sustainable policies and make the procedures more politically acceptable. These suggestions become highly relevant today with a new wave of technologies that opens the way for the widespread implementation of economic-based policies without the burden of high installation and maintenance costs of meters and enforcement. We further make efforts to close the knowledge gap by utilizing qualitative and quantitative evidence for some of the ideas presented.