Saw a few of these this weekend, I'm curious to see if the 407 (Ontario's toll road)cameras can read them at night. I imagine this gets changed quite quickly if they can only read the old plates.
Also an ex-firefighter called in too and said that the flat plates (old ones had the characters imprinted) would make it more difficult to identify the remains of fiery vehicle crashes.
Your be surprised how often cars have the wrong/stolen/fake license plates.
...typo? or...?
It would be nice if some of the US states without tolls could do this on purpose, because many of the ones with them use them primarily to extract revenue from out of state drivers disproportionate to the cost of their use of the roads.
This would also improve the privacy of their citizens, since it would presumably also interfere with ALPR in general and keep their vehicles' location history from ending up in adversarial third party databases.
Anti-ALPR license plates are a feature, not a bug.
The point is to allow a human to identify the car, not a network of cameras connected to a computer database. The ideal would be a plate that could be read by humans but not cameras, but failing that, a plate that can't be read by either is preferable to one that can be read by both. That still serves a purpose in satisfying legacy regulatory requirements to have a number plate even if it's now vestigial and no longer serves any non-bureaucratic purpose.
The case for number plates has really eroded over time. Originally they couldn't be used for tracking because the logistics for that didn't exist, so that cost wasn't there and now it is. At the same time, their original value was always rather modest. The strongest case is for serious crimes like a hit and run, but even in those cases you need someone to get the plate number which they commonly fail to do, and in the most serious cases it's even less likely because a victim who dies can't remember the plate. So we're talking about it helping in a minority of a minority cases to begin with.
Meanwhile in modern times it's more likely that the perpetrator will be caught on video (especially when every bystander has a camera phone), and then you have their face in combination with the make, model and color of the vehicle, which is enough to have a non-trivial chance of getting caught and preserve the deterrent even without the number plate.
So on the one hand they now have a huge privacy cost that wasn't there before, on the other hand the value was never that high to begin with and it's even lower today than it was originally. So maybe we should just get rid of them.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-licence-plate...
Also, and this is anecdotal, I'm from a small town that votes overwhelmingly conservative, and a common talking point I hear is "why should we pay into the cpp? It won't be there when we retire" even though the fund is in no danger of going away anytime soon.