Wheels: Using an App to Report Handicap Parking Violations

App City: Apps to Ease Parking

The company, Pango, recently introduced a smartphone application to manage the parking process. After setting up an account, you can drop your car off with an attendant and keep track of what it is costing you on your phone. When it is time to get your car back, you can tell the garage up to an hour ahead of time so the attendant can retrieve it. Pango also talks with the garage’s computers, so users do not have to use cash or physical credit cards. Tipping still happens the old-fashioned way.

This is all very exciting, but it comes with one big caveat: you have to park in the Imperial parking garage on East 77th Street, just off Lexington Avenue. Pango plans to have two more garages up and running next month, and all of Imperial’s lots functional within a year. The company says it is pursuing partnerships with other garage companies as well.

For now, it is still working out the bugs. When Pango showed me the app the other day, it took almost an hour for the system to recognize that the car we were trying to retrieve was actually parked in the garage.

Pango built its business doing pay-by-phone street parking in Israel, and is in the process of setting up that service in several small cities in the United States. A competitor, Parkmobile, offers pay-by-phone street parking in several cities in the area.

Pango is also eyeing New York’s Muni-Meters, with some pretty ambitious plans. By collecting data about street parking in real time, the company says, it could do things like shift pricing in response to demand, or notify users when spots open up. “We don’t know your name, but we know three people left spaces on 77th Street,” said Roy Arad, Pango’s vice president of operations.

Or at least they will know. New York’s Transportation Department is not ready. The city put out a request for proposals for pay-by-phone parking in 2011 but let it expire without taking action.

Already, though, parking New Yorkers can get some use out of their smartphones. One powerful tool is Best Parking, which has been around in various forms for seven years. Its app’s interface is a map with information on about 1,300 garages in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. You enter where and when you want to park, and it shows rates, with discounts available with coupons it has negotiated. Redeem these coupons with a special code, and Best Parking gets a commission.

The app also offers information on street parking, with color-coded indicators for free, metered and no parking zones.

Keeping all this information up-to-date is a big task, said Ben Sann, a 24-year-old Manhattan native who founded Best Parking before he even had a car. Some information is provided by garages, and the company offers Starbucks gift cards to users who report incorrect information. The company also sends out an employee to pound the pavement four times a year.

How did Mr. Sann learn that parking was a local obsession? “Seinfeld.”

Have a favorite New York City app? Send tips by e-mail to appcity@nytimes.com or by Twitter to @joshuabrustein.

Big Deal: Automated Parking Garages For the Car-Obsessed

But imagine a different world, one free of such proletarian strivers. You pull into your high-end condo building, drive your car onto a steel pallet and shut off the engine. The glass door of the oversized elevator closes and you and your car are whisked upward at 650 feet per minute. The elevator stops on the floor of your apartment and deposits your car in your parking space. You get out and walk a few steps into your home. As an added bonus, a glass wall separates your private garage from your living room, so you can stare at your fine automobile from your couch, as if it were in a showroom.

That reality doesn’t quite exist yet in the United States.

But a Miami developer, Gil Dezer, has planned such a system for the Porsche Design Tower Miami, a luxury condo complex in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla. The development, which has already sold over half of its 132 units, is expected to be ready in early 2016. In the meantime, a smattering of residential buildings in New York, Miami and Los Angeles boast fully — and semi — automated parking systems that are time savers for residents, and space savers for developers.

To me it seems like the ultimate amenity for the car-obsessed. Parking attendants, however well-meaning, are human, and a parking garage can be a house of horrors, especially in a place like Manhattan, where every inch counts. And for celebrities and billionaires trying to keep their activities as secret as possible, who’s to say whether the friendly valet isn’t a tipster for a gossip blog?

“We have some celebrities who bought specifically because they don’t have to see any valets or security when they come into the building,” Mr. Dezer said. “They don’t need to sign autographs, they don’t need to take pictures.”

In New York only one building, 200 11th Avenue, where Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban reportedly own an apartment, has created a parking system that lets residents ascend with their cars to their apartments. And it’s not even fully automated. In fact it seemed fraught with peril at first glance. Residents drive into the garage and onto a car elevator, shut off the engine, and then, once the elevator has risen to their floor, have to back their car themselves into the private space next to their unit.

It sounded to me like a recipe for scratch city, especially with my poor driving instincts. But Leonard Steinberg, a broker with Douglas Elliman who lives in the building, designed by Annabelle Selldorf, and who worked on its development, said that residents had encountered few problems with the system since the building opened in 2010. He says the elevator does not operate until the car is shut off. When the resident arrives with the car at the apartment, a sensor automatically turns on the lights and an exhaust fan in the garage.

“The only area where you have to have a little bit of skill is backing up in your garage; beyond that it is pretty basic stuff,” said Mr. Steinberg, who acknowledged that he is the only resident who doesn’t have one of the private garages. “The people that live in the building and use this system are really loving it.”

The garages are enclosed concrete structures with walls that can contain a fire for three hours, making them safe as well as soundproof, Mr. Steinberg said. “If someone crashed into a wall they would be crashing into a foot thick of concrete. There is not one bedroom or living space that abuts the garage or car elevator.”

Two Manhattan buildings — 1 York Street in TriBeCa and 123 Baxter Street in Chinatown — have automated parking systems in which the resident pulls up and steps out of the vehicle, and then the system parks the car somewhere in the garage.

At 1 York, the developer Stan Perelman, who heads Jani Real Estate, said he researched systems around the world, eventually teaming up with a New Jersey company, Park Plus, which had licensed Swiss technology for use in the United States.

Residents who bought early in the building, like Michael Hirtenstein, were skeptical at first. “It just sounded a little kooky,” said Mr. Hirtenstein, who has a 10,000-square-foot apartment he combined from five and a half separate units. “But I think it is great. Whenever there is any little problem, the service company comes and fixes it.” He has three cars parked in the garage.