You can finally pay for Toronto street parking with your phone

By the end of the year, Toronto drivers will be able to pay for on-street parking with a smart phone.

The city's Green P mobile app, which is already available for parking lots, will send an alert when time is about to expire and allow drivers to extend their parking sessions remotely.

"This kind of stuff just makes sense and it's long overdue," Mayor John Tory said Monday at a news conference where the new function on the app was unveiled.

Tory says the parking upgrade is part of a larger effort to modernize Toronto city services and the way they are delivered.

The mayor acknowledged that Toronto is several years behind other cities when it comes to parking technology.

"We're not the first in Canada to have this but we're going to be striving to be first more often," Tory said.

"Let's face facts. We were behind as a city. We'd allowed ourselves to fall behind."

According to the Toronto Parking Authority, about 25 percent of all payments for municipal parking lots are made with the Green P app, which was first launched in March 2015.