News

Oct 02, 2023

Skip that windshield, the ticketless parking ticket could be here soon

No one likes parking tickets. But imagine how you'd feel if your windshield was

No one likes parking tickets.

But imagine how you'd feel if your windshield was clear but your mailbox was full of parking tickets you didn't know you had racked up.

License Plate Recognition, the same technology that gave us cashless tolling, is making a difference in parking enforcement — putting an end to paper permits and window stickers and providing mounds of real-time data — and could soon give us ticketless parking tickets, opening a huge potential revenue stream for suburban municipalities.

At least one suburban parking official said he's waiting for the right moment to give it a trial run.

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Talk to enough parking-enforcement officials — from Scarsdale in Westchester County to Hoboken in northern New Jersey and everywhere in between — and you'll hear what Hoboken's parking boss Ryan Sharp said recently: They're not out to make money.

"Our No. 1 goal is compliance," Sharp said. "We'd like to not give out a single ticket if we could all year long. But the reality is that that will probably never be the case."

In Scarsdale this week, Josh Ringel, assistant to the village manager, demonstrated the village's new high-tech License Plate Recognition system that made an immediate impact when it was rolled out this month.

"Within the first two weeks we found a handful of people who were either using somebody else's permit or they copied the permit," Ringel said. "But that went away after two weeks. The goal, at the end of the day, is compliance."

Scarsdale police have outfitted a patrol car with four small cameras: two on its trunk hood, two on its rear fenders. They will capture parking data throughout the village — including whether cars have been parked too long on village streets.

Ringel said he thinks ticket revenue might actually fall as compliance increases.

Still, the cold reality is that parking violations are a municipal cash cow: Scarsdale made $600,000 in parking fines last year, about $33 per capita; Hoboken raked in close to $6 million, or a whopping $108 per Hoboken resident.

Nobody pulls in more from parking tickets than New York City, at $545 million in 2016, $63.20 per capita.

Another reality is that if Hoboken and other tech-savvy municipalities wanted to, they could open the technological spigot and generate untold thousands, possibly millions, of dollars using the hardware and software they already have on hand.

Parking enforcement — a reliable revenue steam for municipalities large and small — was put in the spotlight in April.

That's when a three-judge panel in the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled that physically marking tires with chalk to track how long a car had been parked qualifies as a search of property under the Fourth Amendment and could be illegal without a warrant.

The case — brought by a woman who sued after receiving more than a dozen tickets in Saginaw, Michigan — was sent back to a federal judge in Michigan for more work.

The ruling technically only applies in the circuit's purview of Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee and Kentucky, but nonetheless has parking officials nervous nationwide.

Jason Glei is vice president of marketing and information technology at the National Parking Association, a Washington, D.C.-based trade group representing more than 100,000 parking professionals — from valets to private-lot operators to municipal parking officers.

He said news of the ruling has rippled through his membership.

"In any government entity, nothing's a problem until it is," he said. "It simply wasn't on the radar and this story, this court action, puts it on their radar."

Tire-chalking is still in use in Pleasantville and Irvington in Westchester and in Englewood, New Jersey, to name but a few.

Former NYPD detective and current CUNY Professor Joe Giacalone had a different reaction to the ruling.

"I didn't even realize that the chalk fairy still exists," he said, incredulous. "I was like, 'In 2019, police departments are still chalking tires? Geez, what are they, using an abacus to figure out how much the fine costs?'"

The ruling could be a boon for license-plate-recognition firms, such as MVTRAC, Vigilant and Genetec, Giacalone said.

"If you're in the business of revenue generating from parking and you still have a chalk fairy, you've just been put into the backseat in this industry," he said.

To hear Ryan Sharp tell it, if you get a parking ticket in Hoboken, you're in the vast minority — but perhaps not for long.

Sharp, Hoboken's director of transportation and parking, said the "capture rate" — the number of violations detected by the city's LPR vehicles versus the number of actual tickets written — is "shockingly low."

"It's 2 percent of the known violations at any given time," Sharp said, standing beside a Hoboken Parking Utility LPR-equipped van on First Street. "There are a lot of violations at any given time and there isn't enough manpower to get to all of them."

Hoboken employs about 30 parking enforcement officers on staggered shifts between 7 a.m. and midnight, Mondays through Saturdays. At any given time, Sharp said, there are between 8 and 13 on the streets.

There's a lot of parking to cover, Sharp said. Hoboken has 9,000 on-street parking spots, with a mix of resident, metered and time-limited parking.

Hoboken has had LPR cameras on two cars since 2014, able to cover 32 linear miles of city streets in four hours, with the on-board computer flashing each time it identifies a parking violation: an expired meter, overtime parker, missing permit.

The technology cuts thousands of dollars once spent on paper permits and paperwork, and makes it easier on the parking public, Sharp said. In addition, the technology has:

Ringel, in Scarsdale, said the village turned to LPR largely because it offered virtual permitting. That has allowed the Westchester village to save $13,000 a year on paper tags and postage and plastic pouches for each permit.

It's one thing to know where the violations are; it's another to get a ticket under the windshield wiper.

"You have to actually physically track down the car and stick a piece of paper on the windshield," Sharp said. "You miss cars who leave before you get there and you have limited manpower."

On July 1, Sharp will ask the City Council for $500,000 to upgrade Hoboken's LPR system, to buy two new computers with software and two electric or plug-in-hybrid vehicles.

Sharp will employ an "infantry" of 10 ticket writers per shift on foot, bike or electric scooter covering enforcement zones of a few square blocks each. The LPR vehicle will cruise the city without having to stop to write tickets and will transmit violations and their locations — geocoded and clustered on a map — to ticket-writers’ electronic tablets.

IHS Markit, a global data and information services business, has been tracking the rise of LPR, also called Automatic Number Plate Recognition.

Oliver Philippou, the firm's lead security researcher, said the global market — including for red-light cameras, security and traffic control — was estimated to be about $900 million last year, "of which the global parking and time management market was estimated to be about $70 million. North America accounted for the largest geographic region, estimated to be about $30 million in 2018."

The parking piece of the sector is booming, Philippou said.

"Parking time management market revenues are forecast to be the fastest growing of all ANPR applications from 2017 to 2022," he said.

But it's not just private garages that are using the LPR tech. It's in use for parking enforcement across the Lower Hudson Valley, in New Rochelle and New Castle. In addition to Scarsdale, Peekskill has also just added it.

Nearly 6 years ago, Croton-on-Hudson turned to LPR to monitor the 2,000 spots in the massive Croton-Harmon Metro-North parking lot.

Its Genetec system cost about $50,000 to outfit one vehicle with special wiring, a computer, a computer mount and software.

The impact was immediate, said Kristine Gilligan, the village's deputy village clerk and parking manager.

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Before, residents would get quarterly stickers to put in their windows and parking officers would use a handheld device to scan each sticker and each plate to see if they corresponded. With 1,700 permits issued for the 2,000 spots at the Croton-Harmon station, the workflow was "cumbersome and tiresome," Gilligan said.

"There were days when even three shifts of officers, one per shift, couldn't get through the entire lot," she said. "And some people duplicated the permits and we’d find fake ones. Let's just say some people got creative."

Five years later, the change is complete.

"The camera's on the car and each officer, each shift can get through the lot several times," she said. "It's more convenient for the customer because everything's online.

While the tech is bad news for those trying to skirt parking rules — with more $35 violations being written in Croton — it's good news for the village's bottom line. Gilligan said last year's parking-violation revenue village-wide totaled $243,085, about $29 per capita.

But what Gilligan appreciates most is the efficiency.

"It's phenomenal," she said. "I just can't express it enough how much it's changed."

Sharp said there could come a time, in the not-too-distant future, when violations could be issued without having to put anything on the offending car's windshield. The notice could be forwarded to a billing company and a violation notice mailed.

"Our understanding from our law department is that legally we could do it if we follow very specific procedures for how we issue the ticket in terms of how it's given out, certified mail, things like that," Sharp said. "But we're holding off for the right moment to try it out on a limited, pilot basis to see how effective it is and how well received it is by the community."

Ticketless parking tickets wouldn't fly in Scarsdale, said Police Sgt. David Rosa.

"I don't think our residents want that," said Rosa. "Change is hard for our residents and our Village Hall is very resident-based. And this is Scarsdale. We're not running and chasing bad guys every two seconds."

Ringel, who has been overseeing the LPR implementation, agreed.

"For somebody to come down here and think they didn't get a ticket and then a week later get a ticket in the mail I think would be more of a negative experience," Ringel said.