Prince George, B.C. –  It’s been five weeks since the City of Prince George  introduced its new License Plate  Recognition  system to  track and ticket  parking violations in the downtown core.  Manager of Bylaw Services, Fred Crittenden says  it’s having an effect.

“I think we are seeing  some good  things happening” says Crittenden  ” In the first week,  we issued 194 tickets  for overtime parking,  that has dropped down to  79 in the fifth week,  and each week we saw a decrease.”

Under the new rules,   a maximum three hour limit  is allowed for parking in the  downtown core,  regardless of block.    Crittenden says over the five weeks, there has also been an increase in the   use of the hourly/daily   off street parking lots.  “For instance in October,  we had 2724 transactions in our offstreet lots,  that  increased in November to 5755.  So people have gone to our offstreet parking options, which is a good thing.”

Since the  new license plate recognition  program was introduced,  a total of 652 tickets have been issued,  however,  Crittenden says 40% of those were either immediately cancelled, or turned into  warnings.

He says  the first week of the new system   resulted in  numerous calls of complaint “The first week was really bad,  the numbers indicated we get calls on about 26% of he  tickets we issue, that’s a little  higher than normal, but I think a lot of it has to do with  the understanding of what the three hour zone is versus  the two hour time limit was before, and we’re seeing that number ( of complaints) come down as we are seeing the number of tickets issued come down.”

He says there are still plenty of spaces  for rent on a monthly basis,  and expects  more will  move to take advantage of that option  when the hourly/daily lot  fees increase as of January 1st.  ” That will probably have some of those  who are paying $4 dollars a day right now make the decision  to, you know,  at $6 dollars a day it’s better for me to  get a monthly stall.  The great thing about that is it will free up more hourly/daily  stalls for the casual user of the downtown  area.”  He says there are still about 300 off street monthly parking stalls available in the downtown area.  There are also about 300  hourly/daily stalls available.

But there have been some hiccups.   One of those ‘hiccups’ was   identifying  those who  were in the core  early in the day, left,  then returned later for other business. “Those are the ones that we say, that’s something that needs to be cancelled.”  Another  glitch  was  brought about  by the weather  says Crittenden “With out offstreet machines, there’s been the odd  day where we lost connection and they’ve gone off line so we didn’t have credit cards being charged right, just  little  stuff like that.   The cold weather,  we had a machine the heater wasn’t working   quite well enough and it wasn’t  accepting the coins the way  it should.”   He says that problem  has  been corrected.

“We didn’t expect this to go without hiccups but we are working with staff and letting people know how it works and the best  way to deal with it and we are tying to address those  as  quick as we can.”