Parking Enforcement

If you forgot the quarters for the meter in New Jersey, you better think twice about parking. That's because municipal parking enforcement officers have a new high-tech tool - a hand-held computer from Symbol Technologies, Inc. - that will allow them to instantly check a vehicle's warrant status and write and issue summonses on the mobile computer from anywhere on their beat.

Symbol is providing its PPT 2733 mobile computer, based on the popular Microsoft PocketPC Operating System, to the New Jersey Administrative Office of the Courts' Parking Authority Ticketing System (PATS). This deployment is part of the PATS System Upgrade project, and will be initially installed in 21 municipal parking authorities.

The Symbol devices will allow the Parking Enforcement Officers using PATS, already considered one of the most sophisticated parking enforcement systems in the nation, to communicate with the PATS Central Server in Trenton via wireless wide area network technology. Officers merely enter a vehicle's license plate, and warrant status for the vehicle is retrieved from the State's mainframe.

When it was decided to upgrade PATS, the New Jersey Administrative Office of the Courts conducted an extensive and exhaustive search of approximately 50 handheld computers currently on the market. The Symbol PPT 2733 was ultimately chosen for the new PATS handheld computer, based on a combination of the 2733's size, weight, ruggedness, multi-tasking capabilities, and wireless connectivity.

Violations entered into the State Administrative Office of the Court's mainframe via a handheld computer means that the local municipal court clerk no longer needs to manually enter tickets from the ticketed copies. Because the transaction is electronic and there is no additional layer of manual entry, ticket rejections from input errors are expected to decrease significantly or be eliminated altogether. Since the tickets are processed in real time, violators can pay for fines immediately after receiving the parking ticket, instead of the next day. And since the tickets are stored electronically, the municipal court no longer has to store paper copies of each issued ticket.

"New Jersey is pioneering a trend we expect to break out in the months to come," said Tomo Razmilovic, President and CEO, Symbol Technologies. "The new mobile worker needs timely information, no matter where they are doing their job, to do their jobs better. They can't wait until they're back in front of their office computer or count on a phone call. They can rely on a Symbol mobile computer, ergonomically and environmentally correct, that includes wide or local area communications and perhaps bar code scanning."

The Symbol PPT 2733 PocketPC-based mobile computer uses an application developed by Symbol business partner Twisted Air Technologies that enables the New Jersey Parking Authority to link into the Municipal Court Services via the Internet, over a CDPD-based wireless WAN. The PocketPC operating system, ideal for multi-tasking, allows the application to provide rapid transfer of data while simultaneously accommodating other tasks, such as digital signature capture or scofflaw lookups. The application software features data redundancy, integrity checking and communications management.