Iran’s Traffic Police have switched to e-ticketing and will no longer issue paper tickets for traffic violations nationwide.
According to Fazlollah Shiri, the Traffic Police chief in Kermanshah Province, paper traffic tickets have become a thing of the past, IRNA reported.
"In a nationwide move, the Traffic Police have replaced paper ticketing with electronic ones," he said.
E-ticketing is a new and efficient way of issuing traffic tickets. To use the system, police officers are required to install a special smartphone application on their handsets and sign in with their police ID number.
Details on how and where the officers can download the app have not been reported. It is most likely that the app is distributed through a private online network.
Whether or not the officer stops the violators, they will be able to send the license plate number of offending vehicles and type of contravention directly to the citation system’s database.
Shiri said the system analyzes the incoming report and sends drivers a text message notice in five minutes.
According to the official, the text message received by drivers includes time, location, type of traffic violation, amount of fine and a serial number.
"Drivers can pay the ticket by sending the serial number to the Traffic Police automated payment system 120 via text message," he said.
Before the e-citation system was introduced, an offline system was used for monitoring traffic violations. Drivers’ behavior on the road was monitored and the plate number of violators was recorded by officers and traffic cameras.
After records were analyzed by authorities, they notified the drivers of the contravention via text messages. The process took at least 72 hours.
All vehicle owners were able to get their traffic ticket report and pay the citations through the Traffic Police website Rahvar120.ir.
The Traffic Police say the old system was time-consuming and open to errors in jotting down number plates. Many officers used to write down the violating driver's license plate number on traffic ticket booklets. Gathering all the handwritten information and processing it was time-consuming.
With the new electronic citation system, the average time of issuing tickets will reduce to a few minutes and the percentage of mistaken citations will also decline. The system is expected to make recording traffic violations more efficient.
Going Paperless
Besides traffic ticketing, a similar shift has also been undertaken for utility billing systems on a large scale in Iran.
A scheme on switching from paper billing for electricity use to electronic billing was unveiled in Tehran by the Energy Ministry in June.
As per the move, electricity power distribution companies across the country will stop issuing paper bills by mid-September and switch to electronic billing.
The bills will be sent as text messages to subscribers who will be able to pay the bills by merely sending the 13-digit serial in the text bills to 10001121.
Energy Minister Reza Ardakanian said the plan will save time, reduce paper wastage and prevent environmental pollution.
“It also expands the government's electronic services and enhances billing management,” he said.
"Efforts are underway to collect the subscribers' phone numbers and upgrade the electronic billing systems in power companies. Electronic billing scheme will become operational throughout the country.”
Currently, the scheme is underway in Qazvin Province as a model project.
Paper bills are being issued by the province's Electricity Power Distribution Company for over 601,000 subscribers every two months.
Hossein Sabouri, the head of the company, said the scheme has been proposed to expand electronic services offered by the government.
The plan was earlier launched by the Telecommunications Company of Iran in 2018. The company offered a 24-hour free call gift for those who pay the bill online before the sixth of the Iranian month after receiving the text message.
The scheme was launched in July 2018 as a pilot phase. Since then, six million subscribers of the company have been receiving their bills via text messages. The company has 34 million subscribers.
ICT Minister Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi earlier told reporters that the nationwide switching to the electronic billing system for all utility services (including water, power, gas and landline and mobile phones) will save up to 14.4 trillion rials ($119 million) annually, which is currently spent on printing paper utility bills.
According to official reports, Iranians annually use 25 kilograms of paper per capita. Twelve trees are felled to make one ton of 100% non-recycled newsprint.
