Wanted urgently: A new numbering system for car registration plates

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

02 September 2007

The Kenyan system for registering motor vehicles is awkward and quite meaningless. The registration “mark and number” is serialised and contains virtually no useful information – apart from the first letter “K” which signifies that the vehicle is registered in Kenya.

It is probably because of this meaninglessness that several readers have asked me what registration number will come after KAZ 999Z. The answer is obviously KBA 001A. But another question that arises is when the series will be exhausted – that is, when it will reach KZZ 999Z.

The easy way to work that out is to divide the number of registration plates remaining by the average number of vehicles registered per month. Since letters “I” and “O” are skipped, every registration mark (e.g., KAA) accommodates about 24,000 cars (999 x 24). Thus the series from KBA to KBZ will accommodate 576,000 cars (24,000 x 24) and KBA to KZZ will have about 13 million.

Now, I registered a vehicle in December last year and it was allocated the series KAW-X. This week I saw a KAZ-E in the streets. Therefore, 56,000 cars have been registered in the last eight months. That is 7,000 per month. At this rate, it will take 1,900 months, or 157 years to reach KZZ 999Z.

That is too far in the future to warrant any worrying about it. But is the assumption of a constant 7,000 cars per month valid? Let’s find out: In 1993, I registered a car and it was allocated the series KAC-Z. Five years later, 1998, I registered another one and it was designated KAJ-X. That works out to 120,000 cars in five years, or 2,000 per month.

Again in 2003 I registered another vehicle and was allocate KAQ-Q. From KAJ-X to KAQ-Q there are 168,000 cars registered in a period of five years. That is, 2,800 cars per month.

Clearly, the monthly vehicle registration is not constant: in the last 15 years, it has grown from 2,000 to the current 7,000 cars. This is a growth rate of about 9 percent every year.

Thus a better assumption would be to say that the number of cars registered per month will continue to grow at the constant rate of 9 percent every year. That is, next year, it will be 7,600 per month and so on.

With this new assumption, it turns out that the current system will be exhausted in about 31 years. Now that’s not too far away. And if the growth rate increases above 9 percent, the series will easily end before the magical year 2030…where our national vision is focused on.

But really, do we want to propagate this meaningless numbering system to its end? I think we should replace it from January next year with a more meaningful system that contains useful information about the vehicle, say, year of manufacture (or registration), province of normal usage, etc. Hon. J. J. Kamotho had suggested it when he was Minister for Transport but it was shot down by fellow politicians by some warped political reasoning.