UA Lab Receives Federal Grant to Expand Electronic Traffic Citation Program

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – The CARE Research & Development Laboratory at The University of Alabama was recently awarded a $500,000 federal grant to use toward a new phase of an electronic traffic citation program. The grant for this E-citation program is sponsored by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Other agencies partnering in the program include the Alabama Department of Public Safety and the Administrative Office of the Courts.

E-citation, which was developed by UA’s CRDL in 2003, is an electronic citation application and ticketing process that allows law enforcement officers to send tickets electronically to the Administrative Office of the Courts. It was piloted at the Alabama Department of Transportation trucking weigh station in Heflin last year.

The one-year grant will expand E-citation into phase two, moving the project to four Alabama counties, including Baldwin, Cleburne, Madison and Mobile. Motor Carrier Safety Unit troopers in those counties will work with mobile devices like laptops and tablet PCs. A statewide rollout is expected to take place later this year to issue the software to the remaining MCSU troopers.

Troopers assigned to the MCSU (a division of the Highway Patrol Division of the Alabama Department of Public Safety) enforce federal motor carrier safety regulations, as well as the size and weight laws of the state of Alabama. When the project is completed, all troopers in the state will use this software.

Phase one of the E-citation project produced a program where motor carrier state troopers use scanners to read a driver’s license. The data from the license is immediately put into the E-citation system. The remainder of the form can be completed quickly and easily using drop down boxes. The state troopers then print a hardcopy of the ticket to give to the driver.

“Our plan is for the E-citation software to eventually be freely distributed to all law enforcement agencies for routine traffic citations, with gradual deployment on a statewide basis,” said Dr. Allen Parrish, associate professor of computer science within UA’s College of Engineering and director of CRDL.

Parrish said there are several advantages to using the E-citation software including:

• Faster ticket issuance which helps keep officers safer by spending less time on the side of busy highways
• Eliminating illegible data
• Minimizing entry errors
• Eliminating multi-ticket copying errors
• Eliminating redundant data entry by multiple agencies
• Producing statistical summaries

The CARE Research & Development Laboratory consists of a group of faculty members, staff, graduate and undergraduate students in UA’s computer science department. For more information about the E-citation project, visit the CRDL web site at http://care.cs.ua.edu.

In 1837, UA became the first university in the state to offer engineering classes and was one of the first five in the nation to do so. Today, the College of Engineering, with about 1,900 students and more than 90 faculty, is one of the three oldest continuously operating engineering programs in the country and has been fully accredited since accreditation standards were implemented in the 1930s.