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Our legislature began to address an important issue last week -- the proliferation of license-plate designs in Colorado. At last count, there were about 150 varieties and sequences.
Plain old green-and-white plates, if of a certain age, can be two letters followed by up to four digits. Newer tags, inspired by California, have three letters and three digits. The latest models sport three letters and four digits, but the State Patrol says they're hard to read.
But that's only a start. You can get a personalized
plate with any message that fits, providing it is approved
by the board of license-plate censors. Then there are
designer
plates, whose color scheme resembles
acid-washed denim -- trendy a decade ago, but rather passe
now that brighter hues are in vogue.
Handicap plates serve a useful purpose, identifying vehicles which can use those reserved parking places. Presumably there are valid reasons for truck, trailer, recreational truck, collector, motorcycle, farm, state legislature, county and city plates.
But what purpose is served by all those veterans' plates that identify former Prisoners of War and Pearl Harbor Survivors?
Certainly veterans deserve our respect and gratitude,
but why the proclamation on their tags? Is it to inspire
the police to say things like Well, sir, I was going to
write you a ticket for going 84 mph back there in that
15-mph school zone, but I can see that you've served your
country, and it would sure be shabby of us to pester you
over such a minor infraction.
Why all the varieties? Maybe it's just a Colorado thing, but we look at license plates as a personal statement, even though they are in fact nothing more than a tax receipt.
For as long as I can remember, people have complained
about changing license-plate designs. When I was a kid,
each county had a number, based on its population rank; a
Denver tag might be 1-4982
while Hinsdale County had
numbers like 63-410.
But they ran out of numbers, and those became
AA-4982
or ZN-410,
which inspired my father
to complain that it was too hard to identify which county a
car came from. There are occasions -- think of a garage
trying to set a fee for auto repairs with the consideration
that a local means possible repeat business while an
out-of-towner is ripe for the plucking -- when it's
important to know the home of a vehicle.
About the time we managed to memorize the new order --
ZA was Custer, ZB Grand, ZD Park, etc., and DR for
Denver Rental
which meant tourists whose pockets
were overflowing -- they californicated the plates with FAM
for Chaffee, FCC for Lake, and the coveted Z series for
rentals.
Beyond the prefix, there's the number -- the lower and
older, the better. Anybody could buy a NATIVE
sticker, but a plate like ZL-1
meant you were a
former county commissioner from a pioneer mountain family,
while FBN326
indicates a nobody.
Some doctoral candidate could devote an entire dissertation to the semiotics of Colorado license plates, and only scratch the surface.
Even so, the Colorado Senate Transportation Committee voted unanimously last week to kill a proposed law which would have brought some order into the profusion of license plates.
The Senate had good reasons for continuing the present
chaotic system. One is that a special plate is an easy way
to placate pressure groups: You want money? How about
your own special license plate that says 'Inner City
Educator'? Good deal, right?
For another, the plates are made at the state prison, and the legislature keeps increasing the prison population, which means they have to create more work for the inmates, and the more variety on the production line, the more work for otherwise idle hands.
So it was a sensible decision, and I look forward to the day when there's a special plate for underemployed rural residents so that we can be somebody, too.
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