"Mrs Redboots" wrote in message
...
Martin Underwood wrote to uk.transport.london on Sat, 25 Jun 2005:

It always intrigues me to look at other countries' ways of solving
problems
(especially if I think our way of doing it is better!!) - in America,
France
and Germany, someone obviously made a conscious decision that it was a
good
idea to change a car's registration number whenever the car changed hands,
rather than either the car keeping the same number throughout its life or
else the driver keeping the same number throughout his life.

Indeed, the present system in some countries is that the car must change
its registration number whenever the owner moves, never mind when the
car changes hands!

Well I suppose it keeps the bureaucrats and the makers of number plates in
business :-)

What were they smoking when they thought that this was actually a *good*
idea, I wonder? It must make it very difficult to track offences (speeding,
parking) if the car number changes; similarly to prove that a car has had
routine maintenance and their equivalent of an MOT test. OK, the car still
has a VIN which is unique and unchanging, but it's hardly practicable for
this to be checked as easily as a car number.


Going back to the earlier theme of "let's mock the Americans' way of doing
things", another thing that I found when I drove over there was that their
standard of signposting, once you got off the multi-lane highways, was
abysmal. Maybe I'm just used to a three-way sign at the junction of almost
every country lane in England. And the road name signs are very difficult to
read because they are in a very condensed font, in white letters on a pale
green background: signs are supposed to be legible! I can only comment on
Massachussetts roads: I don't know whether it's the same in all states. It
doesn't help that the road atlas that I had was organised by town (rather
than being a simple west-to-east, north-to-south arrangement) and the
various maps were at different scales and in different styles. And this was
a map book that boasted on its front cover "highly acclaimed" and "very easy
to use"!!!