XN000022-1973-05-21 — Page 2

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,