Wednesday, June 02, 2004

Want a traffic ticket?

Spotted this article in the NY Daily News: Traffic agents go high-tech. The article doesn't mention it but the device the traffic agents are using is from Symbol. The newspaper article showed the device close-up and you could easily see the Symbol logo.

In case you don't want to read the article, Symbol is making a scanner/printer/Wi-Fi/look-up device (Symbol PPT 2800) for traffic enforcement. New York City has about 150 on the street and will buy around 2,000 of them for their traffic agents (the people who give parking tickets out). Registrations in NY state have a bar code so the agent can scan the bar code and it brings up all the information they need to know about the car. The unit is set for Wi-Fi so presumably it could tell the agent if there are any oustanding warrants on the owner of the car or if the car was stolen. The unit then automatically prints out the ticket. It has the added feature of helping to prevent tickets from being improperly issued, so if the traffic agent tries to give you a ticket for an alternate side of the street parking violation on a holiday, the ticket will be rejected by the unit.

The unit is actually being used in several cities. I'm not sure why The Daily News chose today to publish the article but I guess I can't complain. Too bad they didn't mention Symbol.

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