Well, Yes. That IS a Problem.

For many years now (I’m guess­ing twen­ty or so), Indi­ana has had spe­cial­ty license plates for auto­mo­biles. Pur­chase of a spe­cial­ty plate costs extra (I think $35?) with $25 going to the cause/​organization. As the link shows, each spe­cial­ty plate has it’s own design. There are 66 spe­cial­ty plate designs (104 dif­fer­ent plate designs altogether).

I remem­ber read­ing a few years ago of com­plaints from law enforce­ment that the pletho­ra of plates made it dif­fi­cult to iden­ti­fy a giv­en plate. I did not grasp the prob­lem because I fig­ured that as long as they had a num­ber they did not need to know which spe­cial­ty plate the num­ber came off.

Sun­day I came across anoth­er arti­cle about law enforce­ment issues with the spe­cial­ty plates in the Fort Wayne Jour­nal Gazette.

bureau offi­cials con­sult­ed with law enforce­ment offi­cials sev­er­al years ago about how to make spe­cial­ty plates eas­i­ly iden­ti­fi­able. The plates were giv­en a basic white back­ground with black let­ter­ing, with the sponsor’s logo on the left side.

What wasn’t done back then was ensure that no two license plates would have the same sequence of numbers.

Read that last para­graph again:

What wasn’t done back then was ensure that no two license plates would have the same sequence of numbers.

For years, it has been pos­si­ble for as many cars as there were spe­cial­ty plates to have the same license plate number.

I’m sor­ry, but who came up with this idea? And why has it tak­en a cou­ple of decades to cor­rect it?