Nitpicking about number plates

Lennoxschips

Can somebody explain to me why Irish number plates don't use letters to designate cars after the county bit of the number plate. I noticed that in Dublin there are now cars driving around with 9 digit plates - in a country of 4 million people.

Wouldn't it make more sense to introduce letters i.e.: 05-D-A3X2

This would give Dublin 1.5 million plates a year and save two digits. In other counties you could get away with even shorter plates this way.

It may seem like a silly thing to rant on about, but I just don't understand the lack of foresight and logic in the current system.

murphaph

When u say 9 digits, you mean 05-D-xxxxxx, right? cos that means up to 999,999 cars can be registered in any one year in all issuing authority areas. I can't see a million cars ever being registered, even in Dublin in any one year. Fingal wan to issue their own plates soon anyway so expect SDCC and DLRCC to follow suit, pushing the numbers back down.

If you just think the numbers should be shorter then fair enough. I personally have no probs with this aspect of the system (I hate sytems that make the year of registration obvious or known at all-it isn't necessary and creates 'keeping up with the jones' for no reasn).

Sarsfield

What's the issue? Is there a shortage of digits? Are we about to run out? Maybe we should start considering running our cars on renewable digits

laoisfan

Sarsfield wrote:

What's the issue? Is there a shortage of digits? Are we about to run out? Maybe we should start considering running our cars on renewable digits

ROFLMAO

Bluetonic

Lennoxschips wrote:

It may seem like a silly thing to rant on about, but I just don't understand the lack of foresight and logic in the current system.

Your dead right.

As far as i read they will be trialing the system you have mentioned right after the introduction of the new braille registration plates.

seamus

Lennoxschips wrote:

It may seem like a silly thing to rant on about, but I just don't understand the lack of foresight and logic in the current system.

The logic is blinding. Go to Britain for example, and you see a plate like "3AB ZXC". From that you know nothing. You don't know where it was registered, when it was registered, unless you memorise a long list of letters corresponding to dates and another similarly long list corresponding to boroughs (I think). Whereas in Ireland you see "00-D-12546". And you know instantly that it was car number 12,546 registered in 2000 in a certain licensing authority. And there are only 27 licensing authorities - most of which are obvious, if you're from Ireland.

However there is one flaw in the system, and it's not a lack of foresight, it's an attitude thing. Someone pointed it out here before about the practice now of "number plate snobbery". Put simply, regardless of what time of the year you buy your vehicle, come new year's day, people will call your car "A year old" and you stand to lose a lot of money if you try to sell. Also, for example, someone who bought a car in January 2005 will describe their car as "A year old" for the entire year of 2006, when clearly that's not true.

I think your letter system could be adapted to serve this purpose - your have four more letters - A, B, C and D - denoting what quarter you bought the car in. So A for Jan - Mar, B for Apr - Jun, etc etc. Then you'll find people clammering to get 06 - D - D1 (surely buying the last quarter is the ultimate display of having loads of cash!), but nobody's investment is threatened by snobbery.

pH

The UK plates have simplified the years at least now the format is

AA99 AAA

The numbers are the year 06 and change to 56 later in the year, the thinking behind this being that the change of number once a year led to a glut of cars waiting for the new plates, 2 changes a year was meant to split this.

Bluetonic

seamus wrote:

Then you'll find people clammering to get 06 - D - D1 (surely buying the last quarter is the ultimate display of having loads of cash!), but nobody's investment is threatened by snobbery.

Then of course there'll be the prestige of driving 06 - D - D4 which is probably the exact same car as 06 - D - D5 but worth 000s more!

D4 huh!

loyatemu

I think the OP has a point - sure the current system makes it clear where the car was registered but it means some plates have 4 digits (eg 00-D-1) and others have 9 (eg 00-D-101345). Knowing the sequence in which a car was registered doesn't really give you any useful information - the 50,000th car regitered in a year could have been registered in March or September or anytime...

Its not a major issue but I think they should be consistent - ie make all the registering authorities 2 letters (Dublin could be DN or DC) and make the last section a set number of numbers and letters.

btw - 05-D-A3X2
this would only give 67600 plates (26x26x100), not 1.5 million.
3 letters and 1 number would give 175000 - enough for any authority.

murphaph

What's the problem with eliminating the year of registration from the plate? If you're buying the motor you're gonna wanna see th VLC and it'll all be on that. I like the German system. Cars are not replaced just because the plate says it's x years old. You see some cracking '94 A8s over there and they're indistinguishable from the later ones.

DubTony

Did anyone consider that SIMI were involved in the changeover to year designations on plates. Makes sense as dealers really had most to gain form this system.

Sarsfield wrote:

Maybe we should start considering running our cars on renewable digits

Would I need to get an engine conversion for that?

mackerski

murphaph wrote:

I like the German system. Cars are not replaced just because the plate says it's x years old.

That's probably down to the fact that the plate doesn't say how old the car is. The only identifiable part of a German plate is the 1-3 letters before the dash, which identify the registration authority. It wouldn't make sense under the German system to encode the year of manufacture, since they don't use the plate-for-life system that we do. Rather, when you move to a different area, you are obliged to re-plate your car, and likewise when you buy second-hand, you'll also need to register the vehicle and be issued with new plates.

One of the consequences of this is the possibility for a driver to keep the same plate across a succession of cars.

Dermot

murphaph

....and the german system allows an element of number plate personalisation, funnily enough you can't get things like NS, SA, SS etc. on your plate, I wonder why?!

mackerski

But they will give you gems like:

SHA-G
STA-B
SHA-T


In theory, you should be able to get FÜ-CK as well, but I've never seen it in real life. My favourite, I saw on a red-illuminated car doing business out the back of Munich Ostbahnhof: M-MM

Dermot

Metrobest

I say leave it the way it is. The beauty of the Irish vehicle registration is its simplicity. The plates are very easy to remember when a crash or other incident happens- the same cannot be said for other countries' alphabet soup-style systems.

murphaph

Ah yeah, I've seen K-KK (in Koeln!), classic. You could get K-KK 666 for a laugh!

Lennoxschips

loyatemu wrote:

btw - 05-D-A3X2
this would only give 67600 plates (26x26x100), not 1.5 million.
3 letters and 1 number would give 175000 - enough for any authority.

I was thinking more along the lines of 35x35x35x35.

pH

Given that some numbers and letters look the same (0, O) (1, I), Q is avoided etc you will probably only get 31 characters from the set of numbers and letters

So 4 mixed alpha numerics (923,521) gives approxthe same as 6 numeric only (999,999)

There are 2 questions

Are 4 alpha numerics easier to remember than 6 numbers and are they easier to copy/transpose without making mistakes

Is it easier to remember/copy Y7GE or 876204 ?

I think the shorter mixed sequence is easier to work with.

antoinolachtnai

My background is in psychology and I work a lot on the psychology of computer systems and coding systems, and this is an issue we come up against occasionally.

There are practical issues with alphanumeric codes. A lot of the letters sound like each other (hence the need for some sort of alphabet code). Also, a lot of the letters look like one another or like the numbers, resulting in misreading where numbers are handwritten.

For this reason, I really wouldn't recommend setting up an alphanumeric code system from scratch without a really good reason for it.

There doesn't seem to be any clear conclusion on which is easier to remember accurately. It depends on a lot of things. There is an idea called Miller's '7+-2 rule', which suggests that there is a simple limit to the capacity of short-term memory and that therefore shorter codes are always better, but Miller's rule doesn't really hold out under deep analysis.

My view (after reading some of the literature) is that a lot of short-term memory is basically aural - you remember things in terms of sounds -. The G and the E in the example you give sound a little similar, so there is a greater likelihood you will mix them up.

Another related issue is speed of visual recognition. If you only catch a glance of a number, it is more likely that you will mix up a 'B' and an '8' or a D and an 'O', and so on. The less ambiguous shape of letters should make recognition faster.

So I basically disagree and think that the slightly longer numeric code is easier to handle (but I can see how there is room for debate on this issue).

On a separate issue: there is no real point in providing a code within the registration to give the county of original registration of the vehicle. This used to make sense when reg numbers were allocated and tax/registration was administered on a decentralized basis, but nowadays everything is run from a centralized database. If you got rid of this convention, you could number all of the cars in the country in 7 digits, rather than the current system where it goes up to 10 characters.

I can see why people are sentimentally attached to this convention though.

Antoin.

Victor

Numeric codes are easier to read than alphanumeic codes, which might be an issue with elctronic tolls, safety cameras, etc.

antoinolachtnai

I agree Victor, but do you have any hard information to back that up?

Victor

I think it was Royal Mail came up with it. The found their read errors were much higher than for comparable operation that use numeric only post codes.

OK technology is improving in the area, but you still ahve to account for dirty / damaged plates.