Here is a better, more
elegant
vehicle number system
By MUNGAI KIHANYA
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
09 August 2009
After promising myself that I would not write about power this week, the
minister for Energy came on TV to announced that the KPLC would begin
rationing power from 6th August. I have just one comment to make: This
company is being run like a matatu!
KPLC has been running a serious campaign encouraging people to get
connected to the grid through the
Stima Loan programme: Yet there isn’t enough electricity to serve
the already existing customers… the same way that
matatu manambas tout for
customers even after all the seats in the vehicle are taken!
Enough said; now let’s go to something else.
In September 2007, I wrote about the
Vehicle dealers complained to the Registrar that they were having
problems selling new cars because the registration marks get “old” in a
mater of days. A new system was then developed where the registration
series of motorcycles and three-wheelers was separated from that of
cars, trucks and buses. This will slow down the progression of the
series but it remains a meaningless string of numbers and letters.
For this reason, I would like to suggest a better method that captures
important information about a motor vehicle.
The most important things anyone wants to know are what type of vehicle
it is and when it was registered. The place of registration or of usual
“residence” may also be useful but the last time it was suggested,
politicians went ballistic and killed the whole idea of revising the
system.
Off the top of my head, I can name the following types of motor
vehicles: (A) Motor Cycles, (B) Three-wheelers, (C) Passenger cars, (D)
Light commercial vehicles, (E) Minibuses/Matatus (F) Large Buses, (G) Heavy commercial vehicles, and (H)
Agricultural & Earth-moving equipment.
My registration system would capture the type of vehicle with a single
letter as indicated above. Thus all passenger cars, for example would
begin with the letter “C”. Next, would be the year and month of
registration: this would be indicated using two digits. So all vehicles
registered this month (August 2009) would have the numbers “0809”.
It is clear that this system will have a problem after 100 years
(remember “Y2K”?), but since most of us will not be alive then (let
alone our cars), we can leave that to future generations to sort out!
Once these two pieces of information are captured, the next will be a
“serial number”. If we use numeral digits for this, the registration
plate will look clumsy and will be difficult to memorise – too many
numerals. Thus I would prefer letters.
Letters have additional advantage: they have more characters (A to Z =
26) than numerals (0 to 9 = 10). A four digit numeric code captures only
9,999 vehicles while similar letter code will have over 300,000…even
after skipping “I” and “O” for obvious reasons.
Thus a motor vehicle with registration A0809-BCDE would be the 15,052nd
three-wheeler registered in August 2009. Or would look nicer if we
rearranged it this way; BCDE-0809A? I leave that choice to those with an
artistic eye.
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