You always wanted one... or at least, I did. It Turns out I had to do it myself, but now it's here. A Map of the Street Parking in Manhattan. I had attempted on many occasions, participated in many meetings, to interest a publisher in this idea. The response was always extremely positive, but then the doubts crept in: "Our distributors rule what titles we buy."; "We don't know what niche to put it in."; "We can only publish it as a ‘labor of love'." (meaning I have to finish the whole thing on spec and hope they still want it); "It should stop at 96th Street" (saving money and appealing to tourists). Well, they didn't get it. This is a Map for us, the New Yorkers whose several hundred thousand cars are on the street right this minute. Of course, if tourists want to join, they are welcome too, because it is my hope that this is a map for everybody.

How did this happen?

It all started one night when I was thinking of driving a group of friends down to the village and I realized I had no idea if there was legal parking there at that time. I decided to risk it (as the young and foolish often do) and did luck into parking, but as the years rolled on and I occasionally considered driving to a new neighborhood, I found myself wishing there was some kind of map of the street parking in the city. I asked around at many bookstores, even map specialty stores, and the response was usually some version of “Hey, that’s a good idea!”

I began with the assumption that the Dept. of Transportation must have records of where to install, take down, and repair their signs, but if the initial denials to my Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) Requests was any indication, they didn't keep such records. Well, persistence, and a more all inclusive wording of my FOIL Request, finally got me on the phone with a DOT representative who asked me what it was I really wanted. Once I assured the representative that I had a business strategy, he put me in touch with someone at the Borough of Engineers and my request was eventually granted including a fee of several hundred dollars for the mainframe reel of magnetic tape that they sent me. It was a steep learning curve, but I did find someone to convert the tape to disk and once it was on my desktop computer, I was able to sort through the files to successfully combine sign locations and definitions.

That accomplished I set out trying to interest a publisher in the map. See quotations above. Obviously, these people didn't park on the street because anyone just had to look out a window at one of these meetings to appreciate the sea of cars on curbsides below us and to know there were plenty of people who wanted this map just like I did.

Now, many years later the internet is in full flower and we don't all need publishers anymore. What's more, the internet is a great medium for this map because parking sign rules are evolving and a web-based map can be seamlessly updated with immediate benefits and no additional effort to members. Of course, Alternate Side Parking rules alone had been revised twice since my initial FOIL Requests, so I initiated another FOIL Request, that in our post 9-11 world, turned out to be a quite lengthy, and sometimes irrational, process, but, after a year-and-a-half all the parties understood what I was requesting and I received the current data which made this map possible.