CLIENT INTERVIEW

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In an interview with the Journal News in New Jersey Ryan Sharp, director of transportation and parking for the city of Hoboken describes the goals and PEMS-AI technology used by the Parking Utility and how it has enhanced their services. 

Highlights of the article: 

No one likes parking tickets. 

Ryan Sharp said recently: They're not out to make money.  "Our No. 1 goal is compliance," Sharp said. "We'd like to not give out a single ticket if we could all year long. But the reality is that that will probably never be the case." Ryan Sharp, director of transportation and parking for the city of Hoboken, photographed outside of City Hall on Wednesday, June 19, 2019.

 The goal, at the end of the day, is compliance."  A staffing issue To hear Ryan Sharp tell it, if you get a parking ticket in Hoboken, you're in the vast minority but perhaps not for long.  

Sharp, Hoboken's director of transportation and parking, said the "capture rate" the number of violations detected by the city's LPR vehicles versus the number of actual tickets written is "shockingly low."  "It's 2 percent of the known violations at any given time," Sharp said, standing beside a Hoboken Parking Utility LPR-equipped van on First Street. 

"There are a lot of violations at any given time and there isn't enough manpower to get to all of them." Hoboken employs about 30 parking enforcement officers on staggered shifts between 7 a.m. and midnight, Mondays through Saturdays. At any given time, Sharp said, there are between 8 and 13 on the streets.  

There is a lot of parking to cover, Sharp said. Hoboken has 9,000 on-street parking spots, with a mix of resident, metered and time-limited parking.  Savings, convenience Hoboken has had LPR cameras on two cars since 2014, able to cover 32 linear miles of city streets in four hours, with the on-board computer flashing each time it identifies a parking violation: an expired meter, overtime parker, missing permit. 

The technology cuts thousands of dollars once spent on paper permits and paperwork, and makes it easier on the parking public, Sharp said. In addition, the technology has: 

• Eliminated needs for parking stickers, as virtual permits are linked to license    plates; 

• Eliminated kiosk payment and the need for printed receipts on dashboards; 

• Allowed drivers to pay and renew permits in real-time via an app. 

 It's one thing to know where the violations are; it's another to get a ticket under the windshield wiper. “You have to actually physically track down the car and stick a piece of paper on the windshield," Sharp said. "You miss cars who leave before you get there and you have limited manpower.” 

You can read the whole article here.