GPS Solution Automates Parking Enforcement

Stoke-on-Trent (near Birmingham, England), like most cities, has a designated department to oversee public streets and parking lots. Its parking officers patrol the streets looking for parking violations and issuing tickets. Violators take their tickets to an appropriate parking office to pay at a later date. Stoke-on-Trent's parking officers also note problems with road conditions, including where the problems are, and turn those reports into their office. The city saw GPS (global positioning system) technology and handheld computing as a way to automate its parking enforcement process.

Traffic Support Limited (TSL) (London) is a reseller that provides information technology solutions (e.g. traffic management, ticket payment, and e-government) to local governments and safety agencies. It developed an automated, real-time parking enforcement solution for Stoke-on-Trent with GPS and mobile printing capabilities. TSL installed 35 Microflex CE5240 handheld computers from DAP Technologies (Vanier, Quebec). TSL incorporated Nokia (Irving, TX) GSM (global system for mobile communications) cards into all of the handhelds to give the computers GPS capabilities.

Now, the parking office can monitor its staff on a real-time basis through a mapping product from TSL. This provides additional security to the officers, as the handhelds are equipped with a panic alert button they can press if attacked on the street. Also, the TSL software running on the handhelds provides a greater range of functions that the officers can perform. The parking officers can report observations of a wide range of street management issues, including vandalism, abandoned vehicles, and nuisance behavior.

TSL also included portable printers from O'Neil Product Development, Inc. (Irvine, CA) to automatically print parking tickets when they are written. Because of the handhelds' real-time capabilities, the parking offices immediately receive notice of tickets as they are issued. This enables parking violators to pay for tickets at the parking office as soon as they receive them.