glojo
Hardcore MB Enthusiast
How dare Dieselman say something that is so blatantly non PC. A thousand curses be cast upon him.
Ooops....
[FONT=NNKLPA+TimesNewRoman]All motor vehicles that travel on the road should have a registration plate that makes them easily identifiable. Motorcycles are no different. By ensuring that a motor vehicle is as identifiable as possible then we stand the best chance of gathering intelligence, tracing movement and prosecuting the user of the vehicle. Recent legislation has been designed to make it more difficult to flout the law by requiring manufacturers of registration plates to be licensed. A plate cannot be obtained legally without proof of entitlement to the plate. The automatic enforcement technology, as well as the ANPR units, relies on clearly legible plates.
Motorcycles in particular seem to represent a high percentage of vehicles that display illegal registration plates. They are often undersized and cannot be read from a reasonable distance behind the vehicle. One should ask the question, why is this plate being displayed? Is it that the rider is one of the high percentage of riders with illegal plates that regularly activate speed cameras? Some of these plates are unable to be read by the cameras and so the rider avoids detection.
Is it that the rider habitually rides at high speed on A-roads, flouting road traffic law and putting himself and others at risk? Is he or she displaying a plate that makes it difficult for a witness to read the plate and so identify the rider?
Is it because the machine is one of the significant percentage of high performance machines that are uninsured? The insurance database is available to ANPR and so these riders are vulnerable if they take to the road.
Is it because the identity of the machine is bogus or that it contains a number of stolen parts or is it in fact a member of a serious criminal gang trying to move on the road without being detected?
The one thing that would make life more difficult for all these types of rider is the belief that if they take to the road on a machine that is displaying an illegal registration plate they are likely to be stopped. For those committing serious offences that will be a major consideration. For those doing it out of a fashion for small plates, that will be an annoyance but the fact is that the police have no way of knowing the reason for displaying a plate that cannot be read automatically. Enforcement for this offence is the only way of effectively addressing it and in turn addressing all the underlying reasons why these plates are displayed. Warnings are not effective as the police have been issuing warnings for years and the problem remains. It is for this reason that The Force Motorcycle Wing has agreed to make this offence one where we will show no tolerance and a Fixed Penalty Ticket will be issued on each occasion. It is hoped that over time this approach will be adopted by more and more patrolling officers so that this offence is as likely to result in a prosecution as is an expired excise licence.
What a complete load of tosh........ The experts here quite clearly know better and would strongly disagree.
John[/FONT]
