One Day, City Drivers May Dial ‘P’ for Parking

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The New York Sun

New Yorkers could one day turn to their cell phones and PDAs to find available parking spaces.

According to a report in the New York Times, San Francisco is moving forward with plans to test a new parking program that tells connected drivers where they can find a parking spot. The new technology relies on embedded-in-the-pavement wireless sensors that detect the presence of a vehicle and relay the information to any phone or device with Internet capability.

Council Member John Liu, the chairman of the City Council’s transportation committee, said the parking program could be successful in New York, where parking spots are often hard to come by.

“If it could work in San Francisco, it could work here,” Mr. Liu said in an interview yesterday.

Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday that the Department of Transportation would consider San Francisco’s approach, but suggested that the city might be hesitant to install the technology out of concern that drivers might become reckless while chasing after a parking spot they discovered through their phone.

“We don’t want people to start speeding and running past red lights,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a press conference in Queens. “New York City is so big and so dense that sometimes these solutions elsewhere don’t work here.”


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