this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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Harder to remember than if they group letters and numbers.
Right now remember 1 digit that’s usually 8 or 9, then 3 letters and 3 numbers So 8WTF420 is easier to remember than WT842F0.
I guess that's true but number plates are typically read by cameras anyway. They are primarily used by speed/red light cameras, toll collection systems, and law enforcement.
If you assign random numbers to cars, it's pretty likely that the last four or five digits plus the make and model of the car will uniquely identify a vehicle or at least narrow it down to just a few possibilities. If the assignment software is smart it could probably even guarantee this uniqueness.
Electronic plate readers are an illegitimate anti-privacy technology and should be banned imo. License plates are already too hard to remember, I have a hard time remembering my own license plate number let alone one I had a two second glance at.
Say what you will about electronic plate readers but they do make speed and red light enforcement and toll collection much easier. And be honest, most people only dislike them because they make it harder to get away with bad driving habits that people previously took for granted that they could get away with.
Well I dislike them mainly because they further enable scalable mass surveillance. There should be more barriers to having records of where everyone is. As for automated enforcement, the way it works is often a blatant scam. I once had a commute where I passed by an intersection that ticketed people turning left, the amount of time it allowed was noticeably shorter than normal, and you could see the flash indicating they were ticketing someone basically every time the light changed, for multiple cars, because it activated if you were in the intersection at all after the light turned red. There was always a long line to turn left at that intersection. I mostly avoided getting ticketed but I did get one once, it was through a private company and I just ignored it and nothing happened. I really think most of those get set up because of corrupt relationships between people in government and the people running those companies that handle the tickets.
That issue is not really the problem of the camera though. That's like saying you don't like running water because people have drowned in water before. If the cameras are being misused then that is a political issue.
In my city, the police department operates the cameras and they will send at least one warning before you get a fine unless the violation is very egregious (e.g. double the speed limit in a school zone)
Running water is a technology that tends to solve bigger problems than it causes. You can always count on politics to break sometimes, but when it happens with running water, even if people are getting sick because of lead pipes and sewage is backing up into peoples homes because of organizational dysfunction (happened to me, the city just failed to connect the pipes from my apartment to the sewer and pretended they had), it's still better than the public health catastrophe that is an absence of running water.
On the other hand, for the entire class of technology where the benefit is more automation of law enforcement, I'd argue it's completely the other way around; huge inherent political risk, minimal potential improvement.
Can't say I agree. This is anecdotal but the council installed some camera-like devices on one of the main roads in my city and people got scared of them and slowed down as a result. I don't think the cameras are actually turned on and issuing fines as I don't know any people who have gotten a fine from them, but their presence scares people into safer driving.
Automated law enforcement in fields where guilt can be obviously and objectively determined (resist the urge to make a fallacious slippery slope argument) is, on average, a good thing. People's tendency to bad behaviour is strictly because they think they won't get caught. Telling people there's a $500 fine for speeding means nothing because they know the chance of getting caught is in the neighbourhood of 1 in 10,000. Most people speed every day on every road they drive on but they get maybe 1 ticket every other year. But if they know that speeding on one particular road will result in a 90% chance of getting a $50 fine, they're not going to speed on that road. That's why the cameras are usually painted bright orange or white—to get people to see them and think "oh shit, I don't want a ticket; I'd better slow down".
As long as we have democratic control over our own local governments and strong privacy laws regarding how that data can be used, I do not view misuse of automated number plate recognition systems as a serious threat. In fact, I think it's probably a net bonus. There's a show called Police Interceptors which follows British police and it's absolutely shocking how many stolen cars they recover because someone drove it past an automated number plate recognition camera and it got flagged.
In hit and run accidents, human memory is what needs to be supported by the technology.
Therefore license plates should be designed for maximum mnemonic potential, not CPU efficiency.
I think you're grossly exaggerating the difficult of memorising alphanumeric number plates:
GL7KKUQTHUP70123WD2C1WWQG21AP92BTQYThese were randomly generated and really not that bad to remember. Especially if the system is designed so that you only need to remember the first/last four or five digits. Compare to these (found at random on the Internet) number plates under a mix of the two current schemes:
752EPS47WMT5139AYE877648GDG6Edit: What I really mean to say here, is that random number plates makes memorising the entire number plate unnecessary. You can get away with just remembering the first four digits and the car's make, model, and colour. As long as fewer than 1 million (32^4) cars of the same model and colour are registered, this system guarantees that a car is uniquely identified by its colour, model, and first four of its number plate (i.e. "I was hit by a red Tesla Model X whose plate starts with
EL0N")If you don’t have time to get a photo you probably don’t have time to get the make. I’ve seen plenty of hit and run news reports where the witness just says “dark colored SUV”.
License plates need to be easy for humans to read and remember.
Random number plates are still likely to reduce the number of possibilities to just a few, likely visually distinct, cars.