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New York City Police to Deploy Mobile Hardware to Issue Traffic Tickets

City may recover millions in unpaid fines.

NEW YORK -- New York City is pioneering an innovative mobility solution that can add millions in revenue to the city's coffers.

Handwritten traffic tickets will soon be a thing of the past, replaced by cops with computers. New York City is adopting a traffic summons system with mobile computers and printers. The city says the new system will significantly reduce errors associated with handwritten tickets and, according to some estimates, realize millions in unpaid fines owed the city.

NYPD officers will use a handheld computer with integrated 2-D bar code scanning and wireless local area network (Wi-Fi) communications -- will be an alternative to New York City's current handwritten method of issuing tickets that is traditional in most U.S. municipalities.

With the new system, police and traffic enforcement officers simply scan the two-dimensional bar code incorporated in the vehicle's registration sticker, which is affixed on the windshield, and information about that particular vehicle will be instantly and accurately captured. A traffic summons will then be printed on the spot by a portable wearable thermal printer connected to the handheld computer via the WLAN.

The city will be purchasing approximately 1,500 Symbol mobile computers in 2003. Other cities throughout the U.S. are testing or are set to deploy similar solutions using the mobile computers, data capture and wireless technology.

The City Finance Department collected $429 million in parking violation revenue last year, according to the Mayor's Management Report, but millions more were lost because of problems with tickets, including mistakes, illegible writing and data entry. Such errors are expected to be reduced with the new system.
Miriam Jones is a former chief copy editor of Government Technology, Governing, Public CIO and Emergency Management magazines.