Skip to main content
New York Post Online Edition: news: "September 21, 2003 -- THE city will soon roll out hand-held computers for issuing parking summonses, closing loopholes that have allowed motorists to get out of paying more than a million handwritten tickets each year.

The computers, which scan an illegally parked car's registration sticker and then print the summons, could be on city streets by next month.

Police Chief Michael Scagnelli told The Post traffic enforcement agents in northern Queens would be the first to be equipped.

By mid-February, all 19 parking-enforcement districts will be online, he said.

The Finance Department collected $429 million revenue in parking fines last year, according to the Mayor's Management Report, but millions more were lost because of problems with tickets, including mistakes and illegible writing.

Such errors will not occur with the scanners, officials said.

'The significant advantage is that we will go from a 13 percent error rate to a less than 1 percent error rate,' Scagnelli said.

The scanners will cost $2,100 apiece, but by some estimates the city could reap nearly $17 million a year in extra fines.

'This is about efficiency and accuracy,' said Finance Commissioner Martha Stark.

Officials have been wary of changing the system after the municipal corruption scandal of 1986, when a company called Citisource won a contract to supply computers. The firm turned out to be a scam."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Jodie Lane Project Responds to City Council Testimony

The Jodie Lane Project : New York, NY -- February 12, 2004. The City Council Transportation Committee held a hearing today to investigate the causes of Jodie S. Lane’s tragic electrocution death on January 16th. The testimony revealed a startling lack of oversight on the part of the Public Services Commission, charged with overseeing Con Edison’s compliance with the National Electric Safety Code, last revised in 1913. With only 5 inspectors at their disposal, the Public Services Commission relies entirely on Con Edison to report safety problems. Because Con Edison only reports incidents resulting in injury or death, the PSC was aware of only 15 shock incidents in the last 5 years. Con Edison has acknowledged that it actually received 539 reports of shock incidents in the same period, effectively admitting to misleading the PSC by an order of magnitude. It is not only this discrepancy that is alarming, but also the fact that the Public Services Commission, charged with ensuring

New York Post Online Edition

news : "December 29, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Startling new Army statistics show that strife-torn Baghdad - considered the most dangerous city in the world - now has a lower murder rate than New York. The newest numbers, released by the Army's 1st Infantry Division, reveal that over the past three months, murders and other crimes in Baghdad are decreasing dramatically and that in the month of October, there were fewer murders per capita there than the Big Apple, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. The Bush administration and outside experts are touting these new figures as a sign that, eight months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, major progress is starting to be made in the oft-criticized effort by the United States and coalition partners to restore order and rebuild Iraq. 'If these numbers are accurate, they show that the systems we put in place four months ago to develop a police force based on the principles of a free and democratic society are starting to