City gets serious with scan

J.P. SQUIRE 2009-03-10 Kelowna Daily Courier:

Big Brother is not only reading the licence plate of your parked vehicle, but checking the location of the valve stem on the tire. It‘s all so you won‘t be able to rub a chalk mark off your tire anymore or move your vehicle to avoid a parking ticket. The city has purchased an automatic licence plate recognition (ALPR) device, which records licence plates, the GPS location of the vehicle and the time on streets where there are parking limits. It can scan 3,000 licence plates an hour at speeds up to 125 km/h, doing in 15 minutes what used to take two hours. There are about 10 city blocks in the North End and 10 blocks surrounding the hospital, plus South Pandosy, Mission and Rutland neighbourhoods and beach accesses with time-restricted parking areas. The device is attached to a bylaw vehicle, allowing the officer to drive along a street and quickly identify vehicles on both sides that have exceeded the time limit, the city‘s parking co-ordinator, Stuart Evans, said. “Instead of driving around chalking tires and then returning to see if any vehicles have exceeded the time restrictions, the ALPR system allows more effective use of bylaw officers‘ time,” he said. “This is not designed to increase the number of parking tickets, but it frees bylaw officers for other duties they haven‘t always had enough time to do.”
Impark, which is responsible for pay parking enforcement downtown, will still have employees on foot checking meters and spitter tabs on dashboards. They also enforce yellow curb, fire hydrant and handicapped spots. Most of the downtown also has a two-hour parking limit. The device could be used to ensure no one stays in a spot longer than two hours, but probably won‘t be used in metered areas, said Evans. The city bylaw stipulates a motorist must move a parked vehicle to another city block after meeting the time limit. Evans hasn‘t yet decided how to set up the device, but it can monitor that as well. “It also takes a picture of the valve stem location of the tire to see if somebody has rolled it ahead three feet,” said Evans. “We get them all the time, trust me. We get people that rub off the chalk and then roll the vehicle ahead so that the rub mark is on the bottom of the tire.” A parking ticket costs $30, but will be reduced to $5 if paid within 48 hours. The devices, made by Gentec Inc. of Quebec, are used in municipalities throughout North America. The City of North Vancouver has used the system for six years. Evans said the validity of Gentec‘s ALPR data has been upheld in B.C. courts, one of the factors considered in choosing this technology.