No plate / no travel rule hinges on LTO

Apprehending cars with no license plates should have been done long ago. A plateless car is presumed to be unregistered. Thus, it is not authorized for road use. But for decades the Land Transportation Office has been too slow to issue plates to new cars or replace lost ones. The backlog has forced new car buyers to drive around with mere conduction stickers which, strictly speaking, only allow them to scoot to the nearest LTO branch to register. But even after dutifully paying the fee, there are no plates available. So the owners proclaim this with cardboard signs bearing instead the official receipt number. The problem has grown to a point that car dealers now lend out such signs to customers. Those with lost plates merely replace these with plastic fabrications. Metro Manila’s number-coding traffic scheme in has given plateless car owners an excuse to avoid the trip to the LTO. Too, they see police vehicles with no plates anyway. If the authorities must enforce the plate law don’t obey it, why should they?

The proliferation of plateless cars on the road has become a shelter for crime gangs. Police reports recur with alarming frequency that hoods use such cars for robbery and kidnapping. It was with this in mind that the National Anti-Kidnapping Task Force decided to itself enforce the no plate-no travel rule. But the minute Naktaf chief Angelo Reyes announced it, car owners flooded radio stations with complaints.

Implementation starts in Metro Manila today. In the rest of the country, next month. On the first five days, joint police-military patrols will pull over plateless cars to warn drivers. Starting March 15 the drivers will be arrested, their cars impounded. There is to be no exemption. The lead enforcer is the dreaded PNP-Traffic Management Group, notorious for trigger-happy operatives and summary executions of crime suspects.

Reyes’s drive is expected to send a stampede of car owners pleading with the LTO for replacement of lost plates. There, they will join car agents who have long been in line, waiting two to eight weeks for the release of new plates to customers.

Why the LTO is slow to issue plates is part of its corrupt system. It takes only a few minutes to machine-emboss and laminate a metal sheet. The delay is in transporting the fresh plates from the LTO central shop to branches nationwide. Knowing that such delay worries a new car buyer enough to contemplate shortcuts, sly LTO personnel employ more dilatory tactics through an endless string of plate-release signatories. Consequently the buyer, through the car dealer, bribes the LTO branch for an easier time. P500 usually does the trick. With annual vehicle sales of 100,000 units, it’s a P50-million racket. That amount will rise with the additional queues for replacement plates. Grafters are quick to adapt to new opportunities for extortion, like the no plate-no travel drive.

Old plates are often lost not to corrosion but to thieves. Stolen plates are installed on getaway cars of robbers and kidnappers. Policemen often are stumped when tracking down a hot vehicle whose make and color do not tally with the plate number in the LTO file. To avoid this, Reyes can go hi-tech. Naktaf units assigned to apprehend plateless cars must also be equipped with laptops connected wireless to the LTO’s computer database. That way a plateless car can be checked on the spot if reported as stolen or the owner simply avoided the LTO extortion line. Cars with plates, but whose riders act suspiciously, can also be checked in seconds if the engine and chassis numbers jibe with the registration numbers on file. That way, the Naktaf can take on the additional task of curbing "carnapping." After all, its lead TMG’s main task is to arrest car thieves and recover stolen cars.

But that will have to wait. It takes time to teach computers to cops who are more adept at extor..., er, firearms. In the meantime, Reyes must make do with pullovers. He figures that drivers will find constant arrest and impounding more inconvenient than the LTO line. He also assures them that plates already are available at the LTO. The agency chief swore so, he avers. The long wait is not due to LTO foot-dragging, but to new car buyers who wait to choose the last digit of their plate numbers.

This has yet to be seen, though. Choosy owners are mostly in Metro Manila – those who wish to suit the number-coding scheme to their road routines. But the LTO backlog is nationwide. Even then, the preferred last digit is "8", as in 168 or 888, believed to be lucky feng shui combinations. Thus, the other last digits are theoretically easier to obtain. But they’re not.

The LTO could prove to be the Waterloo of Reyes’s good intention. The agency is slow to issue regular plates, but is too fast to approve the use of commemorative ones. Thus, the proliferation of plates with the generic "Councilor" or "Doctor" or whatever national convention it is that the user attended six months back. Reyes will have to cancel such plates. Any self-respecting robber or kidnapper would want to have such titles for himself.

The LTO is inept too in enforcing laws on sirens and heavy window tints. Only the President of the Republic, ambulances, firetrucks and police cars are allowed to have sirens. But motorists often encounter huge SUVs blasting away because the owner is a friend of a relative of the President’s hairdresser. Only light tints are allowed on windows; five inches wide if on windshields. But with the rule left unenforced, car accessory shops even offer one-way tints. Reyes says dark-tinted cars will be flagged down at Naktaf checkpoints – for the riders’ own sake. For, it is possible that they are being robbed or kidnapped in the safety of their own sunshades.

All this is not to say that Reyes’s no plate-no travel drive is futile. He’s on the right track. Who knows, he just might find out in the end that the LTO was the root of the kidnapping wave.

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