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Do you support use of license plate recognition cameras for parking enforcement?
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Park Cedar Rapids, the city of Cedar Rapids’ parking department, will soon be scanning the license plates of cars parked on downtown streets. Leaders announced a new technology on Monday that they believe will encourage parking space turnover and help them collect unpaid parking tickets.
Jon Rouse, general manager of Park Cedar Rapids, said there are currently no plans to use the license plate recognition cameras to identify expired spaces. “We are really focusing on better collections, versus writing more tickets. We will be out there trying to actively collect those outstanding revenues,” he said.
Rouse added that the definition of “outstanding revenues” typically involves five or more more unpaid parking citations.
Rouse said he is also hopeful the technology will help generate more parking turnover downtown, so businesses consistently have available parking for customers. “They are paying for the meter, and then in some cases they are paying for the meter again. There is actually a parking policy in place that requires them to move from that block space,” he said.
Read the story linked above for more details. Do you think the cameras are a good idea?
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Yet another reason to avoid Downtown. I find it ironic our esteemed city leaders would rather use this technology to identify overdue parking tickets over putting the cameras on a police car patrolling our crime ridden areas looking for wanted felons in cars like every other police department in America does. This just shows what the priorities of City Hall are. Revenue over Public Safety.
I don’t really care about downtown parking since I have not been downtown in over two years. I do think these plate readers should be on a patrol car, not a meter maid vehicle. There are parts of town where the plate readers alert buzzer would be going off continuously. Rather have the money spent getting some of the thugs off the street instead of messing with a business owner that forgot to pay a parking ticket.