What can you do with city data? Call out bad taxi drivers and find parking

“Government 2.0” has been a big buzzword of 2009, with thought-leaders like Tim O’Reilly and The Sunlight Foundation showing the way. It’s a movement that pushes public institutions to use technologies that have thrived in the last five years like social networking and blogging to foster closer relationships with citizens. This entails being more open with data, and encouraging regular people to transform it through mashups and apps for use by others.
A few city governments have made good on their pledges to be more transparent. San Francisco unveiled DataSF, a central clearinghouse for data collected by the city, and showcases some apps here. New York City went a step further, launching a full-on apps contest through Betaworks-backed startup ChallengePost.
It’s been almost three months since the contest launched, and several interesting applications have turned up. Here are a few, and you can check out the rest here. (To be clear, some of the data for these apps is collected through the government like with Bookzee and some of it is bootstrapped.)

Primospot: Hands down, the biggest pain of owning a car in a major metropolitan city is finding a place to park. Primospot is building a database of all parking regulations in Boston and New York, so you can figure out where you’re legally allowed to park now or in the near future. Primospot generates maps like the one above, showing what’s in the red zone and not. Primospot can also send you text messages for when your parking space is about to expire and you can search for parking in the near future (in case you’re working during the day and want to figure out where to park when you go out at night.) And, in case you don’t think it gets any better, you can also compare parking garage prices in real-time. The company just launched an iPhone app called iPark, so you can record where you’ve parked in case you forget it.
All in all, it seems like a very helpful app and one that’s sorely needed in a public transportation-asphyxiated city like San Francisco. The user interface could be a smidgen better. I’d rather see markers showing how much of the curb is available for parking rather than noting a single point along several blocks. It’s a helpful start and the team has been very aggressive in adding features every month.

Bookzee: This app helps you find available library books nearby. You can search for books either on the web site or through the iPhone app and it will show you which nearby libraries have it available. Again, it’s only available in New York. San Francisco’s library system has its own online search, through it could benefit from a facelift and some mobile availability.
Taxihack: Rude taxi drivers better watch out. This app lets people leave Twitter-style mini-reviews of drivers using their medallion number. The interface is barebones for now, but it’s a big step up from the old way of reporting poor taxi drivers. (That was to call 311 and testify before the Taxi & Limousine Commission.) Now if only there was a way to take photos of medallions and pull up reviews, Google Goggles-style. That’s for another day…