The City of Fredericksburg is the first nation in the country to adopt AutoChalk, a high-tech system for enforcing parking violations.
AutoChalk’s technology records the exact location and identifying characteristics of each vehicle, including shape, color, size and GPS location as the patrol car drives by. The main benefit of the system, which costs $100,000 for a laptop, cameras, car and GPS capability, is labor savings. Writes Emily Battle with the Free Lance-Star:
The technology allows a parking officer to patrol downtown in a car instead of on foot. What officers now cover in an hour and a half could be covered in 20 minutes with the new technology.
Not everyone is enthralled. Three of the city’s seven council members voted against adopting the technology.
Let’s hope that Fredericksburg has a good experience with the application of GPS to parking. The next step, as I’ve blogged previously, is to use GPS to track cars without the necessity of any parking officers at all in a system that enables dynamic, time-of-day pricing.
(Photo credit: Tannery Creek Systems)