Number plates an uphill struggle
Thursday January 03 2008
Of late I have noticed a few things about Irish car registration plates.
Firstly, the cars to which some of them are attached -- and by that I include some of the best-selling cars on the Irish market.
Many models simply have two little 'downlighters' which do not illuminate the rear number plate properly -- they simply cast two little beams, leaving the middle and both sides of the plate in semi-darkness. I have noticed that a number of mainstream makers seem to have such poorly designed number-plate lights. It seems surprising that this is allowed in the European market.
Secondly, Irish number plates are difficult to read anyway (and I don't just mean those belonging to folk who drive cars completely covered in mud).
Take for example a late-year registration. It is simply too much information squashed onto a number plate, and as a result the characters are too narrow for any fair-sighted person to read from a fair distance. These number plates with raised characters combined with aforementioned downlighters result in an interesting array of shadows around the characters at night, making them even less legible.
It seems to me that our registration system needs to be reworked.
Normally we seem to copy everything Britain does, and in this case we could actually do well to copy them once more.
The rear number plates in most of Europe are black on yellow as well, because this is the most striking (visible) colour combination (hence road-signage in those colours).
For some reason (none?) ours are black and white.
We also seem to have various accepted forms of number plates, both laminated and 'pressed'. We do not need the two-digit year and two letters for a county either.
A combination of two characters would suffice (thus cutting out two unnecessary characters and making the remaining ones larger and more legible).
God knows, if they can do this in a country the size of the UK, our bumbling idiots with a fraction of the population should be able to manage it.
It may not matter to civil servants, but if someone hits one's car it could be the difference between being out of pocket and not.
ANTHONY HALPIN
BRAY, CO WICKLOW
