Hoboken Parking Permits

When I moved back to Hoboken a few months ago, I had to go through the hassle of getting an updated permit. It was actually much easier than I thought, and took all of 15 minutes at the Hoboken Parking Utility in the City Hall basement, who even have late hours. I only needed to update my insurance and drivers license to my Hoboken address.

But instead of the usual sticker for the back window that changes every year, there is a single sticker for the front window that stays with the car, and no need to change every year. It has a bar code and I was interested as to how the Enforcement cops would scan each car to see if they had paid up? It didn’t seem that efficient.

And now it makes sense, it seems the stickers have passive UHF [ultra high frequency] RFID chips in the sticker to track and monitor cars in the Mile Square city. eWeek has an article on Hoboken’s RFID parking permits.

A parking enforcement officer equipped with a RFID-enabled laptop can point at an RFID parking sticker and get a read out on a host of information: the owner’s name, address, registration number, phone number and permit specifications, as well as the location of the car and whether it’s supposed to be where it is.

“Absolutely every car that walks in we know where they go, where they’ve been—you have a full history across the board,” said [John Corea, director of parking for the city of Hoboken].

“There’s a lot of advantages. We never knew who our customers were, now you know. In a minute, you have everything—driving history, everything.”

So I like the aspect of easy renewal and taking advantage of technology. I am skeptical of the local government abusing the information and being a Big Brother, which of course will happen at some point to some degree, or they will lose the information to a disgruntled employee. In all honesty it already happens this just makes it a bit easier. Now I just need to scrap off the two previous stickers and the two Rutgers ones from my car. Hands down this is better than the horrible and lame policies of Bayonne, which wouldn’t even give me a permit as a resident.

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