Agile working increases revenue, lowers costs and speeds up billing

Westminster City Council working with its integration and solution providing partners purchases NetMotion Mobility for their Parking Enforcement project.

Project Details

For this Westminster City Council Agile Working initiative, the end users are the city's Parking Enforcement officers who patrol the streets issuing Penalty Charge Notices  (PCNs) on cars which have been parked in contravention with the bylaws in force. The project envisioned offering these officers enhanced secure real-time connections to the back-end system from handheld devices that must be able to roam seamlessly between the most cost effective available networks  with three key objectives:

1.       The solution should work without any interruption to the application when roaming across different networks and network types

2.       The solution should not require any extra end user involvement when roaming

3.       Westminster recognises the need for security and the solution should allow multi-factor authentication protection and guard against any security breach for data in transit.

Using NetMotion Mobility XE's seamless roaming and application persistence facilities between cellular GPRS/3G and Westminster's own Metro Wi-Fi network to maintain productivity and secure mobile working for their Windows Mobile handheld-based  Parking Enforcement application, together with  NetMotion Mobility's in built seamless integration with existing  logon processes allows existing  sign on regime for laptops can immediately be rolled out to all handhelds with no further applications development.

In Westminster's case their Microsoft Active Directory based sign-on and authentication  mechanisms have been complemented by the enhanced device and user certificate support  (for  our technical readers - PKI X.509 V3 Certificate Based device authentication using LEAP and PEAP support inherent in NetMotion Mobility). This provides enhanced security and provides the Windows Mobile devices a more secure computing platform for data in transit, guarding against threats such as so-called "Man-in-the-Middle" attacks that can occur with other Virtual Private Network (VPN) alternatives.

Westminster selected Motorola handheld devices for this project. NetMotion Wireless has a long-standing record of working successfully with a broad range of mobile handheld and laptop manufacturers, including Motorola. Following rigorous testing, the latest version of NetMotion Mobility XE has now been confirmed as a Motorola Enterprise Mobility Validated Solution. The tests took place at the Motorola Solution Technology Centre in Holtsville, New York where NetMotion Mobility XE is now a featured solution. [ Click here for a copy of the complete Validation Test Report for your information and for sharing with interested colleagues.] This validation further confirms NetMotion Wireless' commitment to working with products in the mobile and wireless ecosystem of importance to our customers and partners to deliver proven solutions to the enterprise."

General Background to Parking Enforcement

Parking controls and the enforcement system were originally designed to serve the objectives of ensuring road safety and maintaining the free flow of traffic on London's streets.  As the number of cars and other vehicles in London have grown, additional controls have been introduced to manage kerb space where demand for parking exceeds supply.

The 1991 Road Traffic Act decriminalised parking enforcement, passing responsibility for this from the Metropolitan and City police forces to the London boroughs.  The Act paved the way for a widespread change in the approach to parking enforcement as Local Authority Parking Enforcement Officers were created and empowered to issue penalty charge notices and to authorise vehicles to be clamped or removed.

By 2003/04 nearly six million penalty charge notices were issued in London bringing in an income of some £300 million pounds for boroughs who, after expenditure, made surpluses of more than £113 million pounds for their parking accounts. [In 1990/91, the last full year of police enforcement before the  1991 Act started to encourage the police to start to reduce their activities, 1.8 million fixed penalty notices were issued by the Metropolitan Police and the traffic warden service.  By 1996/97 over 3.5 million PCNs resulted in just over 27,000 appeals.  In 2003/04 over 5.9 million tickets were issued attracting nearly 44,000 appeals. ]

The issue of parking enforcement in London cannot be considered without an understanding of the basis for parking regulations.  The first parking restrictions were introduced in the 1920s, with the first meters (in Manchester Square) in  1958.

In Britain, and in central London in particular, it was not uncommon to find cars double or even triple parked in various locations.  A study of road accidents in London in 1947/48 showed an overall increase in accidents of 8 per cent whereas in another part where several miles of road had had parking controls introduced, accidents fell by 31.5 per cent. Studies following the introduction of the new metered controlled zones showed  that the number of parked vehicles was halved, and traffic flow speeds increased by 16 per cent from 8.2mph to 9.6mph. Traffic accidents decreased by 21 per cent  in the zone - but in similar uncontrolled areas the number of accidents rose by 22 per cent.

Click next to view details of Westminster's business requirement, and looking to the future with working practices and new technologies.