New License Plate Complaints Pour In

Mr. Kim (35), who lives in Seoul, liked the newly designed “horizontal” license plate. He went to the Gangnam District Office on November 3 to change the license plates of his Kia Motors Rotze, which he bought earlier this year, only to return in an irritated state.

The office refused Mr. Kim’s application for two new “horizontal” license plates, one for the front and one for the back, saying, “We received a note saying vehicles that came out of the factory on or before October 31 are allowed to use the new horizontal plate only for the front of the car and a license plate of the original size must be issued for the back.”

Mr. Kim was very angry, saying, “I called an official of the Ministry of Construction & Transportation and explained that the license plate frame of my car was made so that it could fit horizontal plates, and there was no problem with the license plate lights, but it was no use. The officials seem to be doing everything based on their own convenience.”

After the new license plates began being issued on November 1, the complaints of citizens requesting that older cars be permitted to use horizontal license plates are pouring in to district offices and vehicle registration offices.

However, the ministry allowed only a few cars such as the Tuscani and Veracruz of the Hyundai Motor Company, which changed the license plate area on cars beginning from those that came out of the factory on November 1, to use the new license plate on the back of the car, saying, “Older cars cannot be permitted to use horizontal plates on the back because the sealing bolts that secure the rear license plate and the position of the license plate lights aren’t right.”

For cars that came out of the factory before November 1, only the front license plates can be changed to a horizontal one.

Because of this, thousands of postings criticizing the policy of the ministry have appeared on the ministry homepage and Internet portal sites from November 1.

They are saying that although cars that recently came out of the factory are made so that horizontal plates can be used on the back of the car if the position of the sealing bolts are slightly altered, the ministry is preventing this alteration for no reason.

In a posting on the ministry homepage, Mr. Lee complained, “Even though my car is a German car in which the sealing bolts and lights are made for horizontal shaped plates, they wouldn’t issue a new plate just because it’s not a newly registered car.”

License Plate Replacement Project Full of Problems –

The License Plate Replacement Project of the Ministry of Construction & Transportation has been traveling rocky road since its initiation in 2003.

In September of 2003, the ministry trial-issued reflective license plates that are easy to read at night, but cancelled its plans for adoption immediately when it was discovered that these plates cannot be captured by speeding monitor cameras.

In January of 2004, a new license plate that omitted the district name brought on the reaction that “the numbers were too big and the design was terrible.”

When the opposition of drivers grew worse, the ministry devised a makeshift plan in two months, distributing a license plate with slightly smaller numbers and a different design in March of 2004, and began the process of entirely changing the design.

In order not to repeat their past mistakes, the ministry collected opinions through various routes including public hearings, settled on the horizontal license plate in July of 2004, and tried them out on police cars from February of 2005.

However, following criticism that “the design of the numbers is too coarse,” the Ministry again changed the shape of the numbers and on November 1 began issuing the new license plates in two different shapes: horizontal and original.

Due to the incoherent license plate policy of the ministry, the design of license plates has been altered five times in the last three years, and currently there are six different types of license plates actually being used by drivers.

In a posting on a portal site, Mr. Gang pointed out, “The license plate issues seem to show that the intelligence of Korean public officials falls far below the national average.”

mobidic@donga.com