Parking enforcement moves into the 21st century

As many students are aware, parking at UWT is a challenge. However, for students returning to campus this fall, avoiding parking fines will become virtually impossible thanks to some new technology that will be employed by the city.

Currently, many students avoid paying the meter in one of two ways, either by parking far away from the campus and walking over, or by parking in a spot with a time limit and checking their car periodically for the tell-tale chalk-line placed there by one of the city's parking enforcement officers; a game of parking roulette.

Kurtis Kingsolver, a traffic engineer for the city of Tacoma, has been one of the leading forces behind the change and how the city keeps track of parking violations.

Currently the system works this way. The city has been sectioned off in a series of smaller parking zones. Each zone has its own time limit, depending on the local business in the area; zones near restaurants allow a longer time to park than areas where there is a confluence of retail outlets.

These time limits are enforced by having parking officers who travel around the zones on foot, marking the tires of cars with small chalk dashes and returning to the area after the prescribed time limit to ensure that the cars in question are not still there.

This system has been in place for several years, but has some problems.

First, Tacoma has grown over time, and so have the areas of the zones. Some zones, according to Kingsolver, are simply too big for one officer to walk in a single day.

The other issue is that of savvy parking. Many residents of Tacoma and students at UWT are well aware that in order to park close and avoid a ticket involves the practice of constantly checking your car for chalk marks and moving it to another spot in such a way that the chalk mark cannot be seen.

This risk comes with a potential penalty. The fine for being caught chain-parking, the term that the city uses to describe the practice, is typically higher than an average parking ticket.

City officials and local businesses have long been aware of the issue and have asked the city for help.

Starting later this summer, the city will begin to change over to a new system of monitoring cars.

Kingsolver has been among a small list of city officials who have been working closely with area businesses to devise a solution to this problem that is beneficial to everyone.

The first step will be to re-design the zones themselves. The zones will become smaller in size, making it easier for the officers to patrol. Additionally, the smaller zones will allow more flexibility for areas that have a mix of retail and dining businesses.

The next step will be to employ the use of handheld scanners. "No more chalk marks," is one of the aspects to the plan that Kingsolver is pleased with.

Under the new system, parking enforcement officers will use these devices to go into a particular zone (which will be identified by a small barcode on a sign in the area), and enter in the license plate number of each car in the zone.

When the officer returns to that area later in the day, she or he can re-scan each car to determine if it has exceeded the particular time limit for that zone.

The scanners are able to uplink to a GPS satellite and inform the officer if the car is within 1000 feet of its original location, which would put it in violation of the chain-parking ordinance.

When asked about the time limits of each of the zones, Kingsolver indicated that the city is working closely with local business owners in that regard and they have been driving the discussion of the time limits for their particular zone.

He does, however, believe that two-hour zones will become a thing of the past in the new system.

Kingsolver stated that he hopes the new system can be up and running by the latter part of summer, but commented that some aspects of the program are, "still very much up in the air."

Some issues that remain to be addressed are the amount of increased staff it will take to allow the system to run as it was intended and the amount of time it will take to fully roll out the program.

Kingsolver indicated that the scanners themselves are slated to arrive in mid-June, and it will take 6-8 weeks to fully program the zones into them as well as provide training to the enforcement officers in their use. Still, he believes that if all goes as planned, the program will be operational by the latter part of summer.