Human Factors in Parking Enforcement

H O S E W H O A T T E N D E D T H E HU M A N

Factors and Ergonomics Society meetingin Chicago in October 1998 may remem-ber the bright orange parking tickets onillegally parked cars. This article describesthe human factors design process that

led to a dramatically improved parking enforcementsystem.

T h e P r o b l e m

For a generation, Chicagoans had thumbed theirnoses at parking regulations. City and court record-keeping was chaotic. With no credible enforcement,motorists parked in loading zones, and delivery vehi-cles doubled-parked. Stalled traffic prevented timelydeliveries and brought down the wrath of the Environ-mental Protection Agency. Only about 10% of parkingtickets were paid, and, over a decade, Chicago had accu-mulated 17 million unpaid tickets worth $420 million.In the mid-1980s, the Illinois legislature authorizedmunicipalities to create a civil administrative adjudica-tion system for parking tickets. Several Chicago may-ors announced plans to implement a new system, butwithout success.

In 1989, Richard M. Daley was elected to fill out theterm of Mayor Harold Washington, who had died inoffice. Daley was looking for high-visibility initiativesthat could be accomplished before he ran again in Feb-ruary 1991. Parking was one of these initiatives. InNovember 1989, I was recruited from the prosecutor’soffice and given the responsibility for designing andimplementing an effective program that would capturepublic attention. We had 10 months (before a Septem-ber 1990 target date) to write a city ordinance, design anew system, write a Request for Proposals to bring inan outside technology vendor (the city’s mainframedepartment could not handle the system we envisioned),negotiate a contract with the vendor, construct neigh-borhood service centers, install new equipment, design anew parking ticket and associated forms and notices,convert 17 million records, and educate city personnel,police, and the public about the new system.

T h e R e s u l t

The new system went live on schedule and withinbudget and worked smoothly from its inception. Aparking ticket program that had been a joke and a scan-dal had metamorphosed into a technologically elegant,cost-effective system that was successful at controlling

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Human Factors

illegal parking, yet perceived as fair and easy to use.Within a year, the same-year ticket payment rate rosefrom 10% to 65% and annual revenue increased to $65million, while the total annual cost to taxpayers de-creased by about $5 million. The program was one of25 finalists out of 1900 submissions for the 1991 Har-vard University Kennedy School of Government/FordFoundation Innovations in State and Local Governmentaward and the 1992 Computerworld/Smithsonian awardfor innovative uses of technology. It was profiled in aFortune magazine article as a public sector success storyand cited by the Chicago Tribune in its endorsement ofMayor Daley for reelection in 1991.

T h e D e s i g n P r o c e s s

My small staff of city employees followed a designstrategy based on systems and human factors principles.A few principles were emphasized over and over, con-stantly reminding us to “think systems,” build in feed-back, and always consider what individual users wouldactually do with tickets, forms, and equipment.

Image-based systems design. We began by thinking“from scratch” about how a parking enforcement system

should work, drawing flow diagrams to show informa-tion paths and Venn diagrams to see how componentshad to coincide in time or location. This level of abstrac-tion helped us break free of mental constraints rootedin the old system, enabling us to avoid mere efficiencyimprovements.

For example, Venn diagrams helped us see that tick-et adjudication required matching up not people andphysical documents (such as tickets) but information:data entered by the ticket writer, the motorist’s expla-nation, and various records from the database. This led us to replace paper and microfilm with an image-based solution that permitted on-line, paperless adjudi-cation at neighborhood service centers and flexibleprocedures for paying tickets or contesting them in per-son or by mail.

Tickets were to be scanned and the images storedon optical disk. Motorists who requested an in-personhearing would be assigned a week-long window ofopportunity to drop by any service center, where a hear-ing officer could simultaneously view the ticket image,the ticket history for the license plate, and the meterrepair database in different windows on a Sun SPARCstation. After reviewing the evidence and hearing themotorist’s story, the hearing officer would key in“liable” or “not liable” for one of five statutory reasons.This automatically updated the database and generateda decision in plain English.

All mailed-in materials would be scanned, packagedas electronic file folders, and staged for decision. Anyhearing officer not occupied with a hearing could logon to the queue and handle the oldest case requiringdecision. These decisions were printed overnight atanother location and mailed. This interweaving of in-person and mail-in hearings made it cost-effective tostation hearing officers at neighborhood locations.

Parking ticket design. Once this basic image-basedsystem design was in place, our attention turned (begin-ning in May 1990) to designing the parking ticket. This

was the single item that touched all components of thesystem. Tickets had to be ordered, printed, shipped, anddistributed.

Twelve thousand Chicago police officers carriedticket books and collectively wrote about three milliontickets a year. Forty full-time parking enforcement aideswrote another million annually. The officer’s copy ofthe ticket had to be collected, scanned, and indexed forimaging, and keyed into the database. The motorist’scopy had to survive rain and sun on the windshield andconvey instructions for disputing or paying the ticket.The ticket envelopes sent back by motorists had to besorted, opened, and processed and the payment posted.This ticket life cycle concept led us to a fast-track simul-taneous design process.

We convened a group of about a dozen people rep-resenting users and the vendors for forms printing,scanning, automated envelope opening, and cashieringequipment. The Police Department initially asked thatwe provide the new design in time to issue a trainingbulletin, but I insisted that police officers participateand that the department assign beat officers – who actu-ally wrote tickets – and parking aides to the project. Theteam also included a graphics designer, Sue Brodarick ofthe Huntley Brodarick Studio, Ltd. in Chicago, whose

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“ T h i n k s y s t e m s ” a n d “ b u i l d

i n f e e d b a c k ” w e r e t h e m a n t r a s o f

t h e d e s i g n t e a m t h a t r e v a m p e d

C h i c a g o ’ s p a r k i n g t i c k e t s .

in Parking Enforcement

ideas on type size, font, and layout were keyto reconciling user requirements and produc-ing a readable ticket.

We met frequently around one large tableto hash out the design. With all users present,the various constraints were understood byeveryone, and we could work together to finda “best fit” solution. The statute required cer-tain elements; scanning equipment requiredwhite space around the OCR number; andtolerances in envelope-slitting equipmentdetermined the margins. The police had onenonnegotiable demand: The ticket book hadto fit in an officer’s rear pants pocket!

Any change suggested by one group hadto fit the constraints and could be evaluatedimmediately from other viewpoints. Onedesign layout looked attractive until the formsvendor explained that it required two passesthrough the printing press, doubling the cost.

Our collaborative approach also ensuredacceptance by all parties. Police and customerservice personnel alike saw that their concerns

were valued and that their design ideas wouldhelp make their jobs easier. People were pre-pared to compromise when they saw howdesign decisions affected both cost and theburden on other parts of the system.

The more we talked, the more ideasspilled out. The beat officers explained thatmost tickets were for a handful of offenses,and they suggested check-off boxes. We ran adatabase sort and found that nine violationsaccounted for about 80% of the tickets. Anearly ticket mock-up (we used PageMaker onthe Macintosh) was formatted with the check-off boxes on the left side and handwritteninformation (license number, location) on theright. Then we realized that most tickets are

The rede s igned traf f i c t i cket adopted inChicago in 1990.

There is a natural re lat ionship

between human factors and

s imultaneous engineer ing,

because i t focuses at tent ion on

the quest ion of what humans

are actual ly going to do with

the product .


written by right-handed people standing in thestreet, not sitting at a conference table. Theleft-hand side of the ticket would be morefirmly supported, so we reversed the design toput handwritten information on the left. Thisimproved support allowed a more legible tick-et with a cheaper grade of self-carbon paper.

Next, we thought about placing the ticketon the windshield. The writing was on whitepaper (for legibility), and we wanted the tick-et placed face-down to protect the writingand display the bright orange reverse side(the mayor picked the color). However, thechances of the police cooperating with such adirective were minimal. We needed a design

solution. We ultimately used a small adhesivestrip so that the only way to attach the ticketto the window or mirror was orange-side up.With the writing reasonably well protected,we could economize on the paper grade. Thefew cents saved per ticket add up when fourmillion are issued yearly.

The basic ticket design was then modifiedfor use with the handheld computers carriedby the parking aides. For each new ticket, theticket writer entered data or selected amongalternatives that were presented sequentiallyin a small window on the computer. Again, weasked the aides how they worked and howtheir task might be simplified. We learnedthat their preference was to enter the licenseplate number first. Illinois was the defaultstate. The current street name was the defaultuntil changed. For a different street, keyingin the first three letters brought up a menu ofChicago street names from a stored directory.A pull-down menu of violations listed thehigh-frequency ones first. Keys had to beusable in wet weather and with gloves on.

Ticket instructions. With the ticket lay-out largely set, we drafted instructions to fitin the space available on the ticket and beganuser testing. We were particularly concernedabout clarity because the legal rules and pro-cedures were changing, and we feared that

The business wor ld understands

the concept of investment , and the

human factors contr ibut ion should

be phrased in those terms.


customer service phone lines and service centers wouldbe swamped with angry or confused motorists. One testgroup was composed of five high school students, allnew drivers. Other groups included city-employed sec-retaries and tradespeople. For each group, we presenteda mock-up ticket with the instruction, “Suppose youfound this ticket on your car windshield. What are yourchoices for dealing with it?” Every time we got a strange(to us) interpretation, we listened to the words the sub-ject used, identified the ticket text that was the source ofconfusion, and redrafted the text. Over 10 days, wemade revisions in the ticket mock-up and tested eachiteration with a new batch of volunteers. When weceased to elicit interpretations that we considered inap-propriate, we stopped testing. Other forms and noticeswere designed using a similar but less elaborate process.

The result of this testing phase was essentially zeroelephone calls from puzzled motorists. This too keptour costs down. Only about 7% of tickets were contested,

and about three-fourths of these used the adjudicate-by-mail option, reducing traffic at the service centersand enabling the hearing officers to decide cases rapidlyonline.

The redesigned ticket is shown on pages 6 and 7.

L e s s o n s L e a r n e d

The Chicago parking ticket project was unusual inhaving a human factors/ergonomics professional incharge, responsible not only for design considerationsbut for the business decisions involving costs and timing.There are, however, some lessons to be drawn from usinga human factors approach in other business contexts.

Focus on the business application. The emphasis onuser-oriented, up-front design was explicitly describedas a way to reduce future business risks and costs byensuring that all components of the system workedtogether smoothly. It was never suggested as an end initself or as something that had to be done to “meethuman factors requirements.”

For example, the ticket design strategy and the con-tractor’s interests were aligned (the contractor had ini-tially planned to print a ticket with the requiredelements placed anywhere they fit). The firm was com-pensated on the basis of a fixed price per ticket and wasresponsible for database maintenance, the customer ser-vice hotline, sending notices, and cashiering. The

account was most profitable if every motorist paid theticket immediately. Next best was a motorist who fol-lowed the instructions about disputing the ticket anddid not phone customer service or require follow-upnotices. Customer testing of ticket instructions mini-mized these future costs.

People become allies when their interests areadvanced. This underscores the necessity of thinkingcarefully about the business incentives implicit in thebusiness contracts used in any large project.

Use language the business world understands. Gooddesign usually takes more up-front investment. Thebusiness world understands the concept of investment,and the human factors contribution should be phrasedin those terms. Time and money spent on design willresult in larger future gains in market share, profitabil-ity, and productivity. If the benefits aren’t there, thedesign process cannot be justified.

In business, it is considered highly desirable to becustomer-focused. The human factors approach canmake this goal operational. User involvement encouragesbuy-in (as we found with the police). Test-marketing(not “usability testing”) is a time-honored way of assess-ing how the market will react to something. Determin-ing how people will perceive information or use aproduct is within this mainstream idea.

Finally, good design makes for a win-win situation.When all the internal and external users can work smooth-ly within the system, costs are minimized, profits aremaximized, and errors and accidents are reduced.

Be conscious of the real business choices to be made.Wickens (1998) made this point in arguing that empha-sizing Type I errors and rejecting the null hypothesiscan blind investigators to the importance of Type IIerrors, and they can miss an alternative that is animprovement over the status quo. The real-world choiceis not between the experimental condition and nothingbut between the experimental condition and whateverthe organization is doing right now. A parking ticket ofsome design will be issued. The only question iswhether a new design will be an improvement over theold. A new design is better if the resulting gain in busi-ness productivity is worth the time and cost of devel-oping and implementing the design.

Use simultaneous engineering. In a traditionaldesign process, design and implementation choices aremade successively and by groups that may not be com-municating with one another (e.g., an architect designsa building and then a contractor has to figure out howto build it; an industrial designer plans a dashboard lay-out, engineers produce the manufacturing specifications,and assembly line workers cope with difficulties in han-dling components). The result can be very costly (and


A new design is better i f the resul t ing

gain in business product iv i ty is wor th

the t ime and cost of developing and

implement ing the design.

delayed and error-prone) if designs that cannot beimplemented have to be redone or if people downstreamin the process have to work around a design constraintthat could easily have been changed had anyone real-ized its importance.

In contrast, simultaneous, or concurrent, engineer-ing uses a design team that incorporates representativesfrom every stage of the product life cycle – from manu-facturing to shipping to customer usage to repair. As wefound with the ticket design, bad or expensive choicescan be avoided, and the whole process is speedierbecause of the immediate feedback it allows.

There is a natural relationship between human fac-tors/ergonomics and simultaneous engineering becauseit focuses attention on the question of what humans areactually going to do (move it, clean it, use it, read it) withthe product at each stage of the life cycle. Although thisis still a relatively new approach in business, it is never-theless a recognized technique that can be cited byhuman factors professionals. Those business people whoadvocate this approach will be natural allies.

Rough and ready user testing. As Donald Normanargued in his address at the 1998 HFES meeting inChicago, human factors/ergonomics professionals whowant to make an impact must be willing to performexperiments that are only as good as needed. We werealways very conscious of time and budget constraints.For both the general systems design and the ticketdesign, we were striving not for perfection but for thebest design we could produce while staying within bud-get and meeting the implementation timetable.

For the ticket instructions, our objective was toenable motorists to form a mental model of the ticketsystem that was congruent with the new statutoryscheme. With the right mental model, motorists couldmake intelligent decisions among their options and poseonly those questions that were relevant under the newlegal framework. Because the new system replaced anold one, we had to make similarities and differencesclear. We had a pretty good idea of Chicagoans’ mentalmodel of the old ticket scheme: Ignore the ticket andprobably nothing would happen, go to court and sitthrough the court call, after which the judge would dis-miss the ticket, find somebody to “fix” it.

Although our user testing process was informal, itwas not arbitrary. We wanted participants who wereroughly representative of our target population ofChicago drivers: over age 16, with a driver’s license, andunfamiliar with our project and its goals. Our strategy ofasking participants to explain the directions on the tick-et was analogous to the puppeteer technique describedby Savage and Pearsall (1998). Prompted explanation isa simple technique for getting people to verbalize asthey navigate through a problem space. It was immedi-ately obvious when our motorists were making assump-

tions that were incorrect, and we tinkered with thewording until the responses indicated a correct mentalmodel. A few subjects said, “I don’t care what the tick-et says. I’m going to call the hotline.” We figured therewas some irreducible number of motorists who wouldbe oblivious to instructions, and there was no point inworrying about it.

I don’t have any data on the correct number of peo-ple to use for such informal testing, but the mentalmodel approach provides some guidance. Within a community – in this case, Chicago drivers – there is acommonality of background information about how therelevant universe works. Signs indicate where parkingis permitted; municipal obligations generally have to bepaid. We took this knowledge for granted and crafted

instructions that would be understood in this context.We didn’t have to explain the concept of a parking vio-lation or why mailing cash was a poor idea.

This probably explains why we never had to back-track to reinstate old language, because another partic-ipant found new wording more confusing. Words thatpainted a clearer picture for one person within the com-munity were effective for others as well. For a morediverse community of potential users, it will take a larg-er, appropriately stratified sample to identify relevantmental models of the way the world works in order todraft useful instructions about how it has changed.

Our participants’ mental model did diverge from thestatutory scheme in one interesting respect, and we ulti-mately adopted their representation. The state statuteprovided two fundamental options: pay the ticket or dispute it. The “dispute it” option in turn had twobranches: dispute by mail or in person:


Pay the Ticket Dispute the Ticket

In PersonBy Mail

The human-centered approach was

key to earning the suppor t of

pol i t ica l const i tuencies such as

pol ice and the general publ ic .

This implicitly incorporates a two-stage decisionprocess. Perhaps being a lawyer, my mental modelmatched the statute. Participants, however, saw the sit-uation – and their choices – in a different way. Theywere simultaneously evaluating the pros and cons ofthree alternatives:

Although there were two legal alternatives, therewere three behavioral options: (a) write a check and mailit; (b) write an explanation of nonliability, include sup-porting documents or photographs, and mail it; or (c)mail in a note requesting a hearing.

There might be an immediate visceral reaction uponseeing the ticket (“They got me.” Or “I’m going to fightthis!”), but the 10-day response period allowed time forconscious strategizing. The inconvenience of contest-ing the ticket had to be weighed against the odds of pre-vailing before the hearing officer. “The signs weren’tposted, but I didn’t have my Polaroid in the car so theyprobably won’t believe me, so I’ll just pay the $20.” (Anan amazing number of people do carry cameras!) Or, “Iknow the meter had expired, but meters are often bro-ken, so I’ll claim it was broken, and I might win. If not,then I’ll pay.”

We soon decided that the behavioral reality of threechoices matched the operational reality of our system.Checks had to be credited and deposited, requests forhearing scheduled, and mail-in adjudication materialsscanned. Having three check-off boxes next to thereturn address was consistent with the motorists’ real-ity and enabled us to sort the mail before opening it.

By reconciling the mental models held by motoristsand the Parking Bureau well before the system wentinto effect, we could tailor the public education cam-paign to emphasize points of difference between the oldand new systems as well as make operational choicesthat would ease our workload.

C o n c l u s i o n s

This successful real-world example illustrates thetremendous contribution that human factors can makein designing a large and complex business system andhelping to meet tight financial and time constraints.Besides improving the technical usability of individualcomponents, the human-centered approach was also keyto earning the support of political constituencies suchas police and the general public. The project alsodemonstrates that basic human factors principles makeintuitive sense and can be readily grasped and utilized byparticipants (police, contractors, business people) withno formal training in the discipline.

R e f e r e n c e sHenkoff, R. (1991, September 9). Some hope for troubled cities. For-

tune, pp. 121–128.Savage, P., & Pearsall, S. (1998). A case study in iterative design.

Ergonomics in Design, 6(1), 18–25.Wickens, C. (1998). Commonsense statistics. Ergonomics in Design,

6(4), 18–22.

Inge Fryklund received a Ph.D. in human factors psychology atthe University of Michigan and a J.D. from the University ofChicago. She is senior vice president for Internet Banking andMarketing at the Mid Town Bank in Chicago, 2021 N. ClarkSt., Chicago, IL 60614, [email protected]. E I D

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Human Factors in Parking Enforcement

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