Digital ticketing of erring motorists starts next week

The Land Transportation Office is arming traffic enforcers with digital ticketing devices that will print citations for erring motorists starting next week.

The handheld mobile devices produce electronic Temporary Operators’ Permits or e-TOP to motorists, LTO Chief Assistant Secretary Jose Arturo Tugade said on Monday.

The e-TOP will replace the manually generated TOP issued to traffic law violators.

“Next week, the LTO enforcers will no longer issue manual TOPs. So for motorists caught by the LTO enforcers, you will receive a machine-generated TOP,” Tugade said, adding that all traffic law violations that will be entered on handheld devices cannot be changed.

“Once mobile data connectivity is available, all transactions will be uploaded and saved to our servers,” he added.

A refresher course on the use of the device has been conducted for law enforcement officers. Field testing of the device was also done.

The device is equipped with a camera and fingerprint scanner for verifying the driver’s license if it is fake or genuine.

The camera can be used as a face recognition scanner.

Two mobile data SIM cards can be inserted on the device to have Internet connectivity that will allow it to send data to the LTO online system.

Even without Internet connectivity, it can still issue a traffic violation ticket.

Currently, the LTO is finalizing the cashless payment feature of the device so that traffic violators can pay fines using credit cards or loaded e-wallets.

“The second phase of our digitization in the issuance of TOP is the cashless payment method where the disobedient motorist can now pay a fine where he was caught,” Tugade said.

According to him, the automation effort follows the directive of President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. to implement digitalization in the agency.