Friends and relatives of legally blind New Yorkers could soon enjoy the parking perks of residents in wheelchairs.

A bill before the City Council would allow vehicles carrying legally blind passengers to park in street spots reserved for handicapped drivers, doctors, members of the press, diplomats, and government officials. Drivers would also be permitted to park in no-parking zones when giving lifts to the sight-impaired.

“There currently are double standards between disabilities,” an advocate for New Yorkers with Disabilities, Michael Sidell, said. While the city issues special parking permits for handicaps that affect mobility, it has never bestowed any parking privileges on the blind.

Opponents of the bill say they fear that issuing thousands of new parking permits to chauffeurs of the sight-impaired would create too many handicapped spots on streets where parking is already difficult to find. Parking permits are an ongoing source of contention in the city, especially in Lower Manhattan, where government workers with parking placards have been accused of using neighborhoods as a free parking lots.

Transit advocates said they would support the bill. “The disabled are underserved by the city’s transportation system,” a spokesman for Transportation Alternatives, Wiley Norvell, said. “This isn’t an unreasonable way of accommodating them. Compared to the abuse of parking permits by government workers in New York City, disabled permits are really small potatoes.”

A spokesman for the city’s Department of Transportation, which would issue the parking permits, said the department does not comment on bills before they have been before a City Council hearing. The bill is scheduled to be heard by the council’s transportation committee this fall.

“If a person has a disability, it’s our job to make their lives on the scale of normalcy,” Council Member Joseph Addabbo of Queens, who is sponsoring the bill, said. “We should put them on a level playing field with others.”