Monday, May 21, 1973
COMPUTERISATION OF DRIVING LICENCES AND
DRIVING OFFENCE RECORDS
Plans are in hand to use computers in processing driving licences
and driving offence records to eliminate excessive paper work and time delays
for maximum efficiency.
A preliminary study on the proposed scheme has already been completed
by the Data Processing Division, the Police Traffic Branch and the Transport
Department and is now under active consideration.
Basically, the scheme will involve feeding punched cards, containing
relevant vehicle and driver information, into the computer to form a comprehensive
file.
One of the many advantages would be that information about vehicles and
their drivers would be made available within seconds to police, magistrates
and Transport Department officials thereby improving operational efficiency.
The computer would maintain the registers and be responsible for all
decisions concerning such matters as renewals and transfers and would print
the appropriate documents.
Rough estimates provided by the Data Processing Division show that
the computer system could result in savings of millions of dollars annually
over the present manual system.
Current estimates of the initial cost of establishing the system
come to about $1.5 million, with an additional $950,000 required later on to
convert the system to an "on-line" operation.
/Basically,