Joshua Brustein from The New York Times just reviewed a new parking app called ‘Can I Park Here’. The app lets you take a photograph of a NYC street parking sign, and then the app will tell you if you can park there or not, and for how long. Once you decide to park, the app will start a timer and mark your location so you don’t overstay the meter or allotted time and get a NYC parking ticket. Totally cool and pretty simple, right?
Brustein tested about a dozen NYC parking spaces, though, and the app just didn’t work for him. The app reported that Brustein wasn’t actually close enough to the NYC parking sign, but even when he put his phone about one foot from the parking sign and took the photo, no luck. He eventually found out that the app doesn’t really read the photographs or the signs; the app is designed to check the phone’s GPS co-ordinates against the NYC Department of Transportation’s (DOT) database of NYC street parking signs.
We’ve used the DOT’s database of NYC street parking signs and it’s actually fairly well done. In this case, Brustein found out that a phone’s GPS function can’t give reliable enough co-ordinates to determine exactly where the phone is. And if you can’t get an accurate co-ordiante, the app will give an error message. According to the founders of the Can I Park Here app, the next version of the app will release in March 2012 and will be more accurate in identifying the phone’s location and will give a map for the parker to plot exactly where he wants to park.
