Yes, my primo friend, it is possible to find free parking in New York City

PrimoSpot is a service which helps you find free parking in New York City. PrimoSpot has gathered all the parking rules information for Manhattan street-parking spaces. Its database, which is accessible from a mobile phone or PC, lists free legal street parking times by address or zipcode on an easy to read map.

November 27, 2007, by itsnearme

PrimoSpot is one of the best concepts of an LBS. Which one of us has not had parking issues? One thing people can always agree on is that parking is hard to find, expensive and a parking ticket will always ruin your mood. In NYC the parking problem is especially hard, where $120 tickets are the norm. I personally have paid $500 worth of parking tickets in the past 2 years...and I don't even own a car!

Enter PrimoSpot, this service is basically an "elbow-grease" effort which tabulated all the parking regulations of New York City in a database which lets users plot parking spot availability on an interactive map.

PrimoSpot's parking map, shows your available spots and the remaining free parking time for each. I find the map even more useful by simply being able to see what the parking regulations are. For example, parking meters in New York City which are not free, and their associated parking rules (in New York City, not all parking meters have the same rules, some are limited to 1 hour, others let you park for 2 - you can find this out using PrimoSpot). The map also includes streets where you can never park(plenty of those in the city believe me).

In the future, I see this type of service evolving to include actual spot availability via web camera or satellite imagery.

The video below shows the service accessed via an Apple iphone: