Cameras in New Jersey parking meters? The 'smart' devices could cause a spike in tickets

Nicholas Pugliese | NorthJersey

Show Caption Hide Caption WATCH: 'Smart' parking meters that tattle on you? You've heard of red-light cameras. This is the parking meter equivalent in North Jersey.

New Jersey — where red-light cameras were shut down in 2014 after a public outcry — is now poised to let towns put cameras in "smart" parking meters, high-tech street monitors that can help issue near-instant tickets.

The devices may help towns manage traffic and free up police for other duties, but they could come at a cost to drivers.

Tickets in one part of Palisades Park nearly tripled in five months after the meters were installed on a trial basis. And a New Jersey courts official warned lawmakers that authorities could issue millions more tickets if smart parking meters and their cameras were in use statewide.

“It’s Big Brother at its absolute worst,” Sen. Joe Cryan, D-Union, said last month despite voting in favor of a measure that would authorize the devices. “It’s just going to screw people left and right; that’s what it’s going to do.”

The large-scale introduction of the meters, now under consideration by lawmakers, would come a few years after public backlash sank New Jersey’s red-light camera program, which had been viewed as life-saving by some and punitive by others.

Palisades Park's pilot program was approved by the Administrative Office of the Courts in 2014 and started a couple of years later with 20 of the devices.

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Besides being able to display alerts in multiple languages — a convenience for the town’s large Korean population — the meters increased the number of tickets issued in one area over a five-month period by about 190 percent, according to testimony last year by Dan Phillips, a court official.

If replicated across New Jersey, a similar program could result in an “exponential increase” in tickets, said Phillips, who urged lawmakers to carefully consider how they let towns use the devices.

“We issue in New Jersey about 2½ million parking tickets a year,” Phillips said in December. “And the increase from this small pilot, which was about 190 percent increase in five months, we could go from 2½ million to 6 or 7 million tickets in New Jersey and a commensurate increase in suspensions and warrants.”

A bill sponsored by Senate President Stephen Sweeney, D-Gloucester, would explicitly authorize municipalities to use the smart parking meters. The measure, S-2579, has already cleared one Senate committee and is expected to be heard in a second on Monday.

Unlike current law, which generally requires a parking ticket to be placed on the windshield of a car, Sweeney’s bill would allow police or parking enforcement officers to remotely review meter-generated footage of an infraction and then issue tickets through the mail using the state courts' e-ticketing system.

Drivers would have a three-minute grace period to feed the meter once they pull into a spot.

Palisades Park has actually installed hundreds of the smart meters throughout town, although only 20 were integrated with the e-ticketing system. The rest have been used under current law, meaning authorities can use the devices to monitor parking but still must issue tickets in person.

David Lorenzo, the borough administrator there, said the devices have relieved police of most of their meter-monitoring activities and helped local businesses by causing parking spots to turn over more frequently.

He also said the borough reached an agreement with a vendor to install and lease the meters, which was a financial “lifesaver” because it eliminated the need to replace 500 outdated meters at a cost of roughly $500,000.

Sweeney's measure is early in the legislative process — it still must be approved by the full Senate and Assembly and be signed by Gov. Phil Murphy — but it has already sparked a debate among policymakers.

Sen. Declan O’Scanlon, R-Monmouth, who led the crusade against New Jersey’s red-light camera program, which he called “government-sanctioned theft,” is actually in favor of the legislation.

The bill specifically prohibits ticketing for “gotcha” infractions like alignment violations, O’Scanlon pointed out, and parking tickets are far less subjective than moving violations at an intersection.

“Here, there’s no question,” he said. “You pull up, you know how much time you’re paying for, you know when it’s running out.”

The bill also requires that the meters be integrated with mobile phone apps that notify drivers when the meter is about to expire and allow them to buy more time remotely.

Those apps could also be set up to allow for someone who has had too much to drink to leave a car parked overnight and pick it up in the morning, O’Scanlon said.

“With these electronic systems, there’s an ability for someone to say right in the app that I am leaving my car overnight on purpose and to participate in some grace period set up by the municipality and the company operating their automated parking enforcement,” he said. “So it could really open up the door to safety.”

Another provision in the bill would impose a $2 surcharge on parking tickets to fund programs to prevent drunken driving and promote designating drivers.

But other lawmakers fear that the bill could hurt downtowns and the residents who frequent them. Assemblyman John McKeon, D-Essex, introduced a bill last year that would have barred the use of electronic parking meters to enable authorities to issue tickets through the mail.

“It’s hard enough to get the people to shop in downtowns as it is, and creating parking meters that are literally going to be money-sucking monsters I don’t think is good public policy,” McKeon said Tuesday. “I think it’s something that would be annoying to people we care about.”

Brian Cassady, CEO of Minnesota-based Municipal Parking Services, which installed the meters used in Palisades Park, said that although the number of parking tickets issued after the meters are installed often spikes, that number usually drops “precipitously” as people get used to the technology and towns launch public awareness campaigns.

“In our experience, compliance with local parking laws typically improves from 50 percent to 60 percent to up to 95 percent after the introduction of our meters,” he said.

Phillips, the court official, said last year that some “large municipalities” had asked to integrate their parking meters with the state’s e-ticketing system, but the courts held off on giving permission in light of concerns with automated ticketing during the red-light camera program.

Rather, Phillips said, it should be up to lawmakers to decide how towns can use the parking meters “because it could have a huge impact on the public.”

Columnist John Cichowski contributed to this article. Email: pugliese@northjersey.com