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Alabama switching to flat, digital license plates
Last Update: 10/10/2006 2:04:43 PM

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) - Alabama's license plates are doing like TVs - going flat and making a huge jump in technology.

Alabama's steel tags with raised letters and numbers are beginning to be replaced by flat aluminum tags that are easier to read from a distance and more reflective than the old tags.

"We will have a license plate in this state that will be more easily read by law enforcement," state Revenue Commissioner Tom Surtees said at an unveiling ceremony in front of the Statehouse Tuesday.

The new tags will cost motorists the same price as the old ones and will begin to appear in county tag offices as old inventories run out. Officials said the first flat tags available will likely be handicapped tags around Jan. 1.

Alabama's tags are manufactured by the state prison system, distributed by the state Revenue Department, and sold by county license officials, who are the probate judges in most counties.

Andy Farquhar, director of the state's corrections industries, said prisoners at Holman Prison in Atmore will keep making the state's tags, but they are leaving behind technology that is more than 50 years old.

The new tags will be lighter because they are aluminum rather than steel, and the metal won't have to be as thick because the letters and numbers aren't raised. The old process used solvent-based ink that produced hazardous waste, and it required gas-fueled drying ovens. The hazardous waste and the ovens are eliminated with the new tags, Farquhar said.

With the old system, prisoners had to make a run of one kind of tag and then switch to another kind. The new system can produce any license plate in any order. That's critical because Alabama has more than 225 tag designs plus vanity plates that motorists special order, Farquhar said.

Probate Judges Luke Cooley of Houston County and Sherrie Phillips of Covington County said the new tag design should mean fewer cut fingers for clerks handling the plates, and the lighter weight aluminum will mean lower shipping and mailing costs.

"We that handle plates are extremely excited," Cooley said.

Farquhar said 3M has provided the reflective material for the old tags and is doing the same for the new tags. The old tags have cost about $1.15 per plate to produce and the new ones "should be close," he said.

But he and Surtees said the state should save money through new inventory management procedures. Currently, probate judges and county license officials reorder tags as they see fit. That often leads to large piles of wasted tags, Surtees said.

With the new system, each tag will have a bar code that will be used to run a computerized inventory system that will automatically reorder tags when a county gets low. It will reduce the need for counties to keep large stockpiles and will cut down on unused tags, Surtees said.

State Public Safety Director Mike Coppage said the new tags have an embedded hologram that makes counterfeiting harder.

Alabama has not had an organized tag counterfeiting ring, but there are cases every year where a motorist without liability insurance or a driver's licenses will try to counterfeit a tag or try to make a novelty tag look like a real license plate, Coppage said.

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Speeders' plates in lights
Speeders are shamed with new roadside display

The M42 is a major British motorway that has a reputation for being a testbed for new roadside technology, with a current traffic management scheme including sensors for tracking traffic built into the road and variable speed limit signs every 500 meters. The latest piece of kit to be tested out during roadworks is a radar-assisted speeding sign that not only flashes when it detects a speeding car, but also displays the license plate number of said car. Yeah, scary. Apparently the public shame (or swift realization that it could also be an automated ticket-writer) that the sign dishes out to speeding motorists is having some effect, with 50% of drivers slowing down once they see their number is up. Presumably the other half were concentrating too hard on getting out their digicams -- look ma! I'm on a roadsign! -- to slow down.
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The number's up for speeding drivers with this new personalised flashing sign being used in roadworks.

Trials have shown that drivers get the 'back-off' message quicker when they see their own registration shown below the speed limit.

Highways consultant firm Atkins came up with the idea in a bid to boost safety for road workers. A radar detects the speed of oncoming cars and flashes the words 'slow down' and the reg plate of vehicles exceeding 55mph. In a trial on the M42 in the Midlands, almost half of drivers breaking the limit slowed.
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Brits to get RFID-chipped license plates
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The UK Department for Transport just gave the go-ahead for a trial of new, RFID-enabled license plates aimed to make vehicles trackable in Britain. Unlike passive RFID which only transmits over short distances, the e-Plate licenses use active RFID technology to transmit vehicle identification numbers and other data to readers over 300 feet away. Not surprisingly, US officials will be monitoring the trial closely with an eye toward bringing mandatory RFID-tagged plates to the States. Active RFID is currently in limited usage on US roadways, where the Department of Homeland Security is issuing RFID tags to foreign freight and passenger vehicles as they enter the country. Privacy advocates cringe in horror at the thought of RFID license plates being used as backdoor surveillance tools, while proponents argue, predictably, that active RFID will help, you know, save the world from terrorism.

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and its only a few min. before we get it over here on this side of the pond... new plates, black boxes in the cars, new id's, new $$$, tracking devices in cell phones... humm... north american union coming to a planet near you...