Legislation advanced by a New Jersey Senate committee would allow towns to use digital parking meters, but those meters would not be permitted to issue an electronic summons for parking violations.
Dan Phillips with the Administrative Office of the Courts says a pilot program in Palisades Park that allowed digital meters to automatically issue summonses resulted in a big increase in tickets.
“We issue in New Jersey about two-and-a-half million parking tickets a year. And the increase from this small pilot, which was about 190 percent increase in five months, we could go from two-and-a-half million to six or seven million tickets in New Jersey and a commensurate increase in suspensions and warrants.”
Senator Linda Greenstein says her bill would allow digital meters to be used to alert an enforcement officer about a parking violation so they could go there and issue a ticket.
“We don’t want to have a program that’s a gotcha program for the public. We want to make certain that people are not given an inordinate number of tickets, that there’s some opportunity to respond. Therefore, we don’t want to have automatic ticketing.”
Jon Moran with the New Jersey League of Municipalities believes the measure is a reasonable compromise that can help local governments reduce costs.
“When you have meter readers or officers going around checking the meters, they can’t be available for other enforcement activities. So, this would free them from that. When the technology tells you there’s an offense, they you could go and observe it and if appropriate issue the ticket.”