The new administration in the District is doing something that should be a great help to commuters, whether they live in the city or not. The city has launched a pilot program that promises to clear the roads of illegally parked cars during the rush hours. You know the ones: They’re on New York Avenue and Connecticut Avenue, they’re on East Capitol Street and Massachusetts Avenue every day, and they create congestion and cause accidents on a regular basis.

District officials say they are partnering with a private towing company to add more tow trucks to the fleet so that more vehicles can be towed quickly.

In the past, vehicles have sat in the right lane well into the rush hour before they got removed, and it created a mess. The vehicles towed by the city trucks will be put onto side streets, but if the private company, AnA Towing, takes them, they will end up at the company’s lot on I Street SE near the Navy Yard. Further, if a vehicle is held for more than 24 hours, there will be a $20 fee for each day it’s held. Add that to the $100 fine, and it seems clear that people should start paying more attention to where they park. The city’s Department of Public Works has a towed vehicle locator on its Web site at www.dpw.dc.gov, or you can call 202-727-5000 and cross your fingers.

AnA has an incentive to tow as many cars as it can, and for commuters that’s a very good thing. For too long the city has ignored this issue, and many have said that it’s because the majority of those impacted are suburban commuters. It’s good to see the new administration is taking a different approach, one that will benefit everyone.

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If you’ve been using some of the neighborhood streets instead of the commuter corridors, you should know that the city is also starting a program of installing traffic-calming devices in the form of speed humps to a number of those small streets. It is hoped that these will lead to a decrease in the number of cars that rush through these neighborhoods and will make things safer for the residents.

We’ve all heard of alcohol ignition interlocks, those devices that are sometimes added by court order to the cars of persons convicted of repeat drunken driving offenses. These require that the operator breath into a tube that’s connected to a device that can tell whether the person has had a drink or not, and they won’t let the car start if alcohol is detected. Now comes word that Toyota is developing a system that it will add to some of its cars by the end of 2009 that can detect if a person is drunk and will shut the system down if necessary.

This system involves sensors in the steering wheel that can measure blood-alcohol content. It can also detect abnormal steering and even has a special camera that can show if the driver’s pupils are not in focus. It’s pretty Orwellian stuff, but for the rest of us it could make the roads a lot safer.

Questions, comments, random musings? Write to Steve@SprawlandCrawl.com.