PATS is a wireless ticketing system available to any parking authority in the state. The Administrative Office of the Courts provides agencies with wireless handhelds and small rugged printers for issuing tickets. Tickets and offense information can be updated in real time and available for disposition immediately on the Administrative Office's statewide database.
Officers enter information into their handhelds, then send it to the database using TCP/IP over a commercial cellular network. If the handheld can't connect to a tower, it saves the information and keeps trying. When a connection is finally made all information is sent to the central database.
"If there is no wireless communication available, when the officer returns to the office and places the PATS terminal in its charger, all of the stored information is downloaded and transmitted via telephone line to the mainframe computer in Trenton. It [is] then [entered] automatically into the court records of the particular municipal court," explained Dennis Bliss, assistant director of Municipal Court Services. "So there is good backup and safety and redundancy."
PATS is in the final stages of an upgrade that will provide smaller, faster machines to parking enforcement officers. The transition to Symbol Technologies' handheld computers began last summer and is expected to be complete in June. The new machines weigh less than one pound, have longer-lasting batteries and run on the Windows CE operating system.
Project supervisor Gwen Gilday expects better response time and better communication between officers and headquarters following the upgrade. "You're going to be able to communicate two directions," she said. "With the current DOS system, you're really just sending a signal and waiting for a signal to come back."
The printers have also been upgraded. PATS officers now use portable Zebra printers. The tickets, which look like large grocery-store receipts, are printed on paper that is nearly indestructible, able to withstand rain, snow and even tearing.
More importantly, the tickets are clear and easy to read, which reduces confusion and case dismissals while increasing case processing efficiency. "Prior to PATS, probably one of the biggest problems municipal courts have is reading officers' writing on the tickets," Gilday said. "If they're data entering them into handhelds that have drop down tables, it makes it very difficult for them to make mistakes. Once that goes into the system electronically, you have a very clean record."
Addressing a Need
PATS was born from efforts to automate and consolidate into one network all 536 of New Jersey's municipal courts. The Automated Traffic System and the Automated Complaint System were the first fruits of this endeavor.
Since PATS began, users have noted a variety of benefits, some of which were planned through talks with the New Jersey Association of Parking Authorities and Agencies prior to the installation of PATS. One of those planned benefits was the generation of management reports based on ticketing information.
"It provides the kind of data, the time of day the ticket's are written, the street the tickets are written on, the type of violation, things you wouldn't even think of," Bliss said of the reports. "Are people constantly parking in front of fire plugs? Maybe they have to change the color of the fire hydrants."
Municipalities can then decide, based on statistics gleaned from the parking tickets, where and when they need more or fewer parking enforcement officers. They can also see trends in parking violations and repeat offenders.
PATS is also helping increase parking enforcement officer safety. Officers can use the handhelds to search the database to see if a car is registered to a scofflaw and check if there is a warrant outstanding for the owner anywhere in the state. If something comes up, officers can make an informed decision about their next course of action. "As they walk down the street, they can read the license plate, and if the people look suspicious they can do a look up," Bliss pointed out. "If a look up comes back with a warrant indication and if it's for a serious matter, they can decide to just turn around and walk the other way. As they're walking away, they can be in touch with their office to say, 'We need some police backup here.'"
The new handhelds also feature a section where officers can write notes about individual tickets. If an officer encounters an angry offender as he is writing the ticket, he can make a note of it. If the encounter results in further charges being filed, the officer will have the notes available to refresh his or her memory before a court appearance.
PATS also makes data entry into the central database much quicker. "In a non-PATS town, the court copy of the paper ticket is physically delivered to the court administrator," Bliss said. The administrator or his or her staff must then enter the information into the statewide database before it can be accessed by the public or other parking enforcement officers. In a town using PATS, the information is available as soon as it is transferred from the handheld to the database, with no additional data entry.
Looking Ahead
Gilday has her eye on the future of PATS. "We'd like to see these handhelds be able to scan [license plates] in the future," she said. Another item on the wish list is the ability to check license plates against the DMV database, so the parking enforcement officer would know immediately if the plate is a fake.
Bliss plans to go into future projects with the lessons from the past. He said the key to making PATS work was planning and standardization. "Planning because it rewards you for really thinking through what it is, what service it is you want to provide. And standardization because you want to have the public in fact be treated the same in every court."
