Sep 30, 2009 10:05 AM
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New York, 9:17 AM
Tue Feb 9
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What is our billionaire Mayor-for-life up to, today? Oh, he has some great ideas for parking! He will make it so easy to park in New York, if you just give him one more term. Parking will be his legacy.
"How would you like to use your mobile device to see a map of available parking spaces in your neighborhood," Mayor Bloomberg asks in a Daily News op-ed, "and also use it to pay your meter?" That would be amazing, if we had a car. (Though we don't think people should be using their "mobile devices" while driving around our neighborhoods maybe?)
Then Bloomberg promises to get rid of the dreaded alternate-side parking in the nicer Brooklyn neighborhoods, and announces that "soon, we'll begin a pilot program in the Riverdale section of the Bronx."
Oh, good. A pilot cell-phone parking meter project will begin soon, in the Bronx.
Man, that reminds us, what were we just reading about the Bronx again? Oh, right, it remains America's poorest urban county with more than a quarter of the population living below the poverty line. And that is not counting the homeless!
"Last year, according to the Coalition for the Homeless, there were more than 110,000 people who spent at least one night in a shelter," said Joel Berg of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger.
The report also found 26 percent of Hispanics are at poverty level — the highest of any ethnic group in the city. The Bronx and Queens are the only boroughs that saw the overall number of poor go up between 2007 and 2008. The Bronx came in with nearly 22,000 people.
"One of the reasons that is, is poor people are being pushed out of places like Manhattan and forced to relocate to the Bronx," Berg said.
Well, hopefully the 2009 numbers will show the effects of Mayor Bloomberg's ambitious, poverty-fighting "mobile device parking meter pilot program."
Send an email to Alex Pareene, the author of this post, at alexp@gawker.com.
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