EVANS CITY — A new system for traffic and summary offense citations will save time for police officers, eliminate work for the district court staff, and allow offenders to deal with their citations more quickly.

Joe McCombs, chief of the Evans City-Seven Fields Regional Police Department, said officers should be using the department’s new electronic ticketing system by the end of the week.

McCombs said officers can simply run an alleged offender’s license and registration card through a bar code scanner.

If the officer decides to issue a citation, the system will fill in all the information on the ticket that officers now must fill in by hand, McCombs said.

The information also automatically imports to the department’s records management system and the district judge’s office.

With a traffic citation, the officer will hand the driver a printout instead of a handwritten ticket.

“It’s all done at the roadside,” McCombs said.

The chief said currently officers who issue a citation must return to the police station and enter the information into the computer. Every few days, a stack of citations are taken by an officer to district court for processing.

“This eliminates all of that,” McCombs said. “It’s a major timesaver.”

He said it also will shorten the duration of traffic stops because it eliminates the time-consuming task of writing the ticket by hand.

McCombs said the system costs about $5,000.

A clerk at District Judge Wayne Seibel’s office said the state police use the e-ticketing system, and the staff has seen its benefits.

The citations arrive in the office the day after they are issued instead of several days later when carbon copies of handwritten tickets are delivered.

E-ticketing helps with docketing since clerks no longer have to type information into the court’s computer system.

The system also helps those who come to court to pay their fine or respond to their citation within the required 10 days. She said clerks now often turn away citizens because they have not yet received the citation from the police department.

McCombs said to his knowledge the Cranberry Township Police Department is the only other police force in Butler County that uses an e-ticketing system.