Safe Speed Forums

[quote="Roger
Don't you mean all that bse? <ducks and exits stager left>[/quote]

Ducks and BSE ---thought it was more sheep and .....(and the Min of AG couldn't make up their minds )

Yep - forgot about farm animals requiring "passports"





Four stomachs full and fart out more pollution than all the wolr's jumbos put together!



Ah.. but it's so we know just what Buttercup was made of .. before we eat her.

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Take with a chuckle or a grain of salt
Drive without COAST and it's all your own fault!

A SMILE is a curve that sets everything straight (P Diller).

A Smiley Per post
FINES USfor our COAST!

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon - but driving with a smile and a COAST calm mind.

The licence plate helps single out individual vehciles without delving under the bonnet to get the chassis number. Therefore:

It helps identify vehicles which have been legally registered in the UK and therefore comply with UK regs.

It helps to identify vehicles which have been written off and then returned to the road.

It helps identify which vehicles are beings driven legally and which lack the proper supporting documentation.

If anyone witnesses a hit-and-run, bank robbery, kidnap, etc surely it's more useful for them to quote a registration number (or part of) than just a make and colour of car?

It always amused me when newscasts describe the perpetrators of a crime e.g. "The bank was robbed by three men in blue boilersuites, wearing balaclavas."
If we took any notice, our local plumber would be arrested as soon as there was a cold snap and he was working on somebody's outside loo!

As if they would still be wearing ANY of the gear described on the news!
Likewise car reg. number. Even stolen motor has false plates on for the raid - last thing you want is to be pulled up for car theft as you are about to snatch several grand in cash!
They are there for the benefit of law abiding motorists, and to keep a simple system of recording ownership details managable.

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Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

This is off topic, but I just have to point out that I don't think the reason for describing what criminals were wearing is so that people can go out and hunt down people wearing the same clothes AFTER the crime.

When a newscaster says something like "the robber was wearing blue jeans, a red t-shirt and a black jacket when he broke into the jewellers on the high street in Bristol" I think the hope is that someone watching at home will think "oh, I was in the high street in Bristol today, and funniliy enough I saw a guy wearing those clothes and acting a bit funny just before the time of the crime, perhaps the police would find this information useful."

BTW we don't have "licence plates" in the UK. That is an Americanism. The number plate confers no licence for the vehicle to be driven. The "licence" is actually what uesed to be called the "Road Fund Licence", now the VED sticker.

Oh good... I'm glad you said that.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I want to differentiate between having some kind of registration system and having a number on display on every vehicle, it's the latter which I'm struggling to see a good enough reason for.

If displaying a numberplate is for crime related purposes surely this is a presumption of guilt?

For identifying the vehicle in a car park, this is probably a non-issue - because we have numberplates we don't bother personalising our vehicles as much as we probably would if we didn't have them. It must have been a problem with horse & carts? I am assuming there were a lot of them made to the same designs.

The tax disc is to show that we have paid for the wonderful vehicle excise duty which .... well I don't know what they use the money for.

For getting your car back after having it stolen, well that's what the VIN is for. Displaying a numberplate could help assuming the thieves don't instantly change it or ship it overseas. Anyway for that purpose it should be optional, like with everything else.

I still can't see how having a numberplate displayed helps me, given that it is only motorised vehicles which have this requirement and nothing else does.
Presumption of guilt is a bad thing, right?

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Andrew.