I cannot speak for places like South Carolina, but out here we tend to have fewer officers than we did one, two, even five years ago. That means fewer people to perform even essential services. Parking enforcement just ain't on our radar screen. Now, that could be the case in the OP's town ... maybe parking cites are big moneymakers. However, consider this ...
Parking cites effect the locals. The locals get ticked if they get nitpicked all the time and this means angry calls, letters, and council meetings. In those states where moving tickets make money, this can be done to people passing through who are NOT locals. That means that such moving violations can collect politically safe revenue, whereas parking cites would come with a risk of political fallout. Now, this isn't true everywhere, and in places like CA where we make diddly on movers and actually make a few dollars on parking cites, if the city is not afraid of the political fallout they could go for parking cites. But, then, we lack the officers to do basic enforcement services, so having the bodies to write parking cites on a massive scale is simply out of the question.
While parking is a potential source of some revenue, the staffing in most police agencies does not make it a prudent or effective use of limited resources unless there is a mandate by a particular community to engage in it. In my town, we had a few years where the local business community sought parking enforcement to keep vehicles from parking downtown all day taking up space. Now that business have closed downtown, the local businesses have reversed themselves and petitioned for the removal of timed parking which had generated a number of citations over the past few years ... though not nearly enough to even pay for more than a few reams of paper for the office ... if we were able to access it out of the General Fund at all.
