UK Officials Tackling Problem Of Unpaid Parking Tickets

Updated: Wed 7:28 PM, Aug 22, 2007

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UK Officials Tackling Problem Of Unpaid Parking Tickets

It's back to class for thousands of students at the University of Kentucky.
And as usual, the first day didn't come without some parking problems.
But some technology may help officials solve another problem on campus - unpaid parking tickets.
It's called the Automated License Plate Recognition System (ALPR).
UK police officers use a car with two cameras mounted on the vehicle, one on each side. The cameras take color pictures of each vehicle, and an infrared picture of the license plate number.
That information goes into the ALPR, and is matched against the UK parking database.
If a vehicle has three or more unpaid citations, the officer gets a signal that the vehicle needs to be checked out.
In that case, a special device is attached the vehicle to disable it.
Officials say some UK students have actually piled up as many as 50 parking tickets in a single school year.
And while UK has never been able to make more money from parking tickets than it costs to enforce the regulations, officials still feel it was worth buying the ALPR.