On Thu, 19 Feb 2004 10:42:35 GMT, "Richard J."
wrote:



What's your problem with the redundancy?

Its a horse designed by a committee.

That's not an answer to my question.


It is, I was clearly referring to ~60% redudancy in the current system.
Which I qualified in the sentence below.


Isn't some of it needed anyway
to enable the old numbering systems to coexist with the new one?

Taking up nearly 60% of each and every plate issued is bad design
IMHO.

You're implying that it needs only 3 characters to identify the vehicle.

Where did I imply that. A vehicle is *uniquely* identified from the 26^3
combination of the 3 character remainder, not the 4 characters wasted on a
static year / registration office. Thats only ~17.5k odd combinations which
one must assume a busy registration office would easily consume in a
matter of days/weeks. Especially with bulk registrations from fleet buyers.

Common sense would dictate that a combination of

2 digit Year
[A-Z0-9] registration location
4 Character Base36 unique ID,

would generate nearly 1.7 million unique registrations in comparison


Personally I consider the issue of yearly plates to be silly.

Giving each license holder his own plate for life would have solved
the problem once and for all.

What is this "problem" that you are so concerned about?

Unnecessarily wasting taxpayers money.

The number of vehicles and licensed drivers on the roads is relatively
fixed when compared to the open ended number to keep track in the current
system.



greg

--
You do a lot less thundering in the pulpit against the Harlot
after she marches right down the aisle and kicks you in the nuts.

Greg Hennessy ) gurgled happily, sounding much like they
were saying :

You're implying that it needs only 3 characters to identify the
vehicle.

Where did I imply that. A vehicle is *uniquely* identified from the
26^3 combination of the 3 character remainder, not the 4 characters
wasted on a static year / registration office. Thats only ~17.5k odd
combinations which one must assume a busy registration office would
easily consume in a matter of days/weeks. Especially with bulk
registrations from fleet buyers.

Erm, not quite.

A vehicle is *uniquely* identified by the full seven characters.

For example - AB51DEF, AB02DEF and AB53DEF might all exist.
AB51DEF, GH51DEF, KL51DEF might all exist.

While it's possible that the 17,500 AB51 registrations may well only last
a week, the office that issues AB has a number of series available to it
for the six month period dictated by 51.

The smallest allocation of codes to an office are Inverness and Truro,
with two apiece, and Bangor and Aberdeen with three apiece.

There's one code allocated to new cars registered to addresses on the
Isle of Wight.

http://www.dvla.gov.uk/vehicles/regm...ent_system.htm
has a disclaimer, too - "Please Note: In the event of one office
receiving an exceptionally high demand that depletes its stock of
registration marks, marks may be transferred between DVLA local offices."

Since there's 19x23 regional identifiers, there's a total of 7.7million
unique registrations available in each six month period.

According to the SMMT, there was a "record" 2.6million new cars
registered in the whole of 2003. OK, that's cars, not
trucks/busses/bikes/whatever, but even so, it's a long way off the 15.4
million available plates....

Greg Hennessy wrote:
On Thu, 19 Feb 2004 10:42:35 GMT, "Richard J."
wrote:
Taking up nearly 60% of each and every plate issued is bad design
IMHO.

You're implying that it needs only 3 characters to identify the
vehicle.

Where did I imply that. A vehicle is *uniquely* identified from the
26^3 combination of the 3 character remainder, not the 4 characters
wasted on a static year / registration office. Thats only ~17.5k odd
combinations which one must assume a busy registration office would
easily consume in a matter of days/weeks. Especially with bulk
registrations from fleet buyers.

Common sense would dictate that a combination of

2 digit Year
[A-Z0-9] registration location
4 Character Base36 unique ID,

would generate nearly 1.7 million unique registrations in comparison

But that's still 7 characters, and it doesn't cope with the 40 DVLA
offices identified in the current system, which the DVLA presumably
finds convenient. So why is it better?

Personally I consider the issue of yearly plates to be silly.

Giving each license holder his own plate for life would have solved
the problem once and for all.

What is this "problem" that you are so concerned about?

Unnecessarily wasting taxpayers money.

The number of vehicles and licensed drivers on the roads is relatively
fixed when compared to the open ended number to keep track in the
current system.

I assume you mean owners rather than drivers, otherwise your scheme
doesn't work for commercial vehicles at all. But I'm still not clear
how you would save money. When a car was first assigned to an owner, it
would need to be registered against that owner's personal number
(assuming a tidy situation where he had just got rid of his previous car
and could therefore reuse the number). It would then have to be
re-registered when sold to another owner. Where is the saving?
--
Richard J.
(to e-mail me, swap uk and yon in address)

On Thu, 19 Feb 2004 22:22:08 GMT, "Richard J."
wrote:


Common sense would dictate that a combination of

2 digit Year
[A-Z0-9] registration location
4 Character Base36 unique ID,

would generate nearly 1.7 million unique registrations in comparison

But that's still 7 characters, and it doesn't cope with the 40 DVLA
offices identified in the current system, which the DVLA presumably
finds convenient. So why is it better?

that's 36 unique registration locations versus 40. What's so special about
maintaining 40 DVLA offices ?

What is this "problem" that you are so concerned about?

Unnecessarily wasting taxpayers money.

The number of vehicles and licensed drivers on the roads is relatively
fixed when compared to the open ended number to keep track in the
current system.

I assume you mean owners rather than drivers, otherwise your scheme
doesn't work for commercial vehicles at all.

No I mean drivers. A commercial vehicle driver turns up and attaches his
plate to the vehicle he's driving that day.


But I'm still not clear
how you would save money. When a car was first assigned to an owner, it
would need to be registered against that owner's personal number

Well apart from depriving garages of the 500 quid plate fees they charge
for putting a new car on the road. How hard is it for a new owner to turn
up with a set of plates and id for the garage to key into the relevant
database.

(assuming a tidy situation where he had just got rid of his previous car
and could therefore reuse the number).

That's the whole point, under the swiss system, one can move the plate
between every vehicle one owns. The function of the plate is to identify
the driver, and the driver can only drive one car at a time.


It would then have to be
re-registered when sold to another owner. Where is the saving?

Why would it have to be 're-registered'. The new owner turns up with his
plates and drives away.



greg


--
You do a lot less thundering in the pulpit against the Harlot
after she marches right down the aisle and kicks you in the nuts.

On Fri, 20 Feb 2004 11:39:34 +0000, Greg Hennessy
wrote in :

That's the whole point, under the swiss system, one can move the plate
between every vehicle one owns. The function of the plate is to identify
the driver, and the driver can only drive one car at a time.

Not in my experience; I was told that a plate may only be swapped
between two different vehicles of the same insurance class. The plate
doesn't identify the driver, it more identifies the insurance -- if you
lay your bike up for the winter, you return the plate to the insurer for
safe-keeping (and a lower insurance premium) during the time it's
off-road. When I left Switzerland I had t return the plate to Zurich
Insurance, not the Aargau equivalent of DVLA.

--
Ivan Reid, Electronic & Computer Engineering, ___ CMS Collaboration,
Brunel University. Room 40-1-B12, CERN
KotPT -- "for stupidity above and beyond the call of duty".

On Thu, 19 Feb 2004 12:30:33 +0000, Greg Hennessy
wrote:



Unnecessarily wasting taxpayers money.

The number of vehicles and licensed drivers on the roads is relatively
fixed when compared to the open ended number to keep track in the current
system.


Form a taxpayers' and risk management. point of view I'd be very
uneasy about dismantling a system that in principle has been around
for 100 years plus (with some work on the number format every few
decades to ensure the continuing supply of new numbers) to introduce
something radically new.

In the US vehicle licensing is the responsibility of individual
states. Some have systems where numbers stay with the vehicle; others
have something like the Swiss system where the numbers stay with the
driver. I wonder whether anybody's done a study on whether one of
these systems is cheaper to administer than the other.

Martin