Before checking meters each morning in his four-square-mile zone, which includes the District’s NoMa neighborhood, parking officer Andre Tolver grabs a smartphone from a bin at the District’s Department of Public Works.
He enters the tag information for each parked car he comes across into an app on the Samsung Galaxy. For cars parked in two-hour zones, the app reminds Tolver to check back exactly two hours later. If he sees a parking violation, he uses a Bluetooth connection to wirelessly print a ticket from a printer attached to his bike. He then photographs the infraction and uploads the image to TicPix, DPW’s online repository of parking violations. TicPix is where those who have been ticketed can search for visual records of their infractions.
Tolver is part of the department’s smartphone and tablet pilot — he and about 75 other officers are trying out a mobile app that lets them digitally upload license plate information and photograph infractions. Most of DPW’s 300 or so officers still use large plastic handheld devices to record and print tickets; purchased about 10 years ago, each handheld cost about $3,000. Samsung tablets and smartphones cost a few hundred dollars each.
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Department of Public Works director William Howland introduced the pilot to reduce equipment costs — the Samsung Galaxy phones cost about $400 each — and to be able to store more photographs and ticket records on each device. He plans to roll out another 100 or so devices in the next few months.
“And, particularly, the younger officers are having an easy time manipulating them,” he said.
Tolver said the smartphone is significantly quicker than the handheld device — it takes him about 10 seconds to enter each parked car into the system, he said. Negotiating the handheld, which often froze, took much longer.
And though the handheld devices could take photographs, they were grainy, and couldn’t zoom in, he said. With the smartphone, Tolver takes higher-resolution, landscape images to illustrate the scene around a parking violation — nearby “No Parking” signs, for instance.
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Because they’re designed for consumer use, the smartphones aren’t as rugged as the handhelds, which are built specifically for parking officers, Tolver said. Since he makes his rounds on a bike, and issues about 40 tickets a day, he said he isn’t sure how well the phone would fare in bad weather.
And there are a few technical glitches — each morning when he picks up his smartphone, he goes into a far-off hallway to wirelessly pair it with his printer. If he’s too close to other colleagues, he might accidentally send a ticket to one of their printers, he said.
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