American Traffic Solutions (ATS) will not only issue traffic tickets to trucking firms, it wants to be hired by those same firms to automate the process of paying photo tickets on the firms' behalf. ATS on Monday issued a twelve-page white paper explaining why large corporations should hire ATS to automate citation payments.

"What most fleet managers seem to agree on is that vehicle-issued violations present a costly, burdensome problem that could use better solutions," the ATS white paper explained.

ATS explained based on its own internal data that ticketing of commercial vehicle fleets is up 45 percent since 2005. ATS says it issued 3.9 million red light camera and speed camera citations between January and November 2012. In addition, toll road photo tickets account for about half of the burden faced by commercial vehicles, overshadowing parking tickets which only account for 22 percent of a fleet's total citation burden.

"Technological advancements in tolling, parking and photo enforcement are making it easier and less costly for ticket issuers to cite vehicles," ATS explained. "As these advances in technology are explored, the net result is a higher volume of tickets for everyone, including fleet owners."

Thanks to better imaging technology and the ability to track multiple vehicles simultaneously with laser speed detection systems, ticketing capacity has increased 30 percent. ATS insists the way to deal with this is VioLogics, a fine management service that transfers liability from a commercial vehicle owner to the employee driving the vehicle. ATS says this restores due process which would otherwise be denied.

"When a fleet or fleet management company pays fines automatically, drivers generally lose their right to due process, preventing them from contesting tickets they believe to be unjustified," the white paper explained. "Once paid, most ticket issuers view violations as closed with no further recourse available... By losing the ability to contest citations believed to be unjustified, drivers also lose the ability to protect their driving records, whether with their DMVs or the driver scoring systems used by their employers."

ATS also offers a program called PlatePass which will manage all toll road payments on behalf of various companies including trucking and automobile rental firms. A number of rental car customers were outraged when, under this program, ATS automatically charged their credit cards with administrative fees. In 2010, they filed a lawsuit in federal court where a judge found merit to the claim of fraud in the way PlatePass charges were not disclosed to consumers.

"The contract however, did not disclose the per diem administrative fee associated with PlatePass, nor did it identify the PlatePass system," Judge Noel L. Hillman ruled on March 28, 2011. "Defendants' representation that the contract disclosed all charges, when in fact it did not, may have constituted an affirmative act of misrepresentation"

The ongoing trial has a hearing on a motion for summary judgment scheduled for May 20. A copy of the ATS white paper is available in a 1.2mb PDF file at the source link below.