Liu promises citywide parking rules access

Taking a moment to bask in the afterglow of a successful campaign to eliminate a costly discrepancy in the “broken meter” parking rule, City Councilmember John Liu promised to “hold their feet to the fire” when it comes to making the all the parking rules available to New Yorkers.
A year ago, on December 5, Mayor Bloomberg signed into a law a bill which requires the city to make all parking regulations available for free on line, “block-by-block,” Liu explained.
There is only one problem. The law had a two-year delay and the effective date for the information to be available is September 1, 2009.
Although the rule is a mere 208 words, it took from early March to late November to get to a Council vote. “There was a lot of back and forth” with the Bloomberg administration Liu explained.
“It’s a lot longer than I would have liked,” Liu said.
“They said there were a lot of systems to get up and running” he explained, adding that the two-year waiting period was “the administration compromise.”
The legislation was written with the “2008 New York City Technology Plan” in mind, which had the mission improve city services through “accessible, transparent and accountable city government.”
It amends the city’s Administrative Code, so the Department of Information Technology and Telephony (DoITT) would either put every parking rule for every block in the city on the Department of Transportation’s web site, or make a new site just for those rules.
Any new parking restrictions - whether temporary or permanent - or any change in existing parking restrictions would have to be posted on the site “immediately.”
The bill was sponsored by no less than 18 councilmembers including Liu, Helen Sears, Peter Vallone and David Weprin, and flew through the Transportation Committee, which Liu chairs and the Committee on Technology in Government headed by Councilmember Gale Brewer of Manhattan.