EDITORIAL - License plates, at last

With pride, the Land Transportation Office inaugurated on April 24 its own plant where motor vehicle and motorcycle license plates will be produced. The plant at the LTO office in Quezon City has seven manual embossing machines that transportation officials say can churn out up to 22,000 plates per day.

That should rapidly reduce the backlog in license plates, estimated at millions of pairs. The problem has bedeviled motorists since the previous administration. Lawsuits prevented the distribution of the plates even after their delivery from abroad and the turnover of the plates to the LTO by the Bureau of Customs. Last January, the Supreme Court mercifully lifted its restraining order on the release by the LTO of 300,000 license plates manufactured by a Dutch-Filipino consortium.

This time, the government must make sure lawsuits by those who have lost their stranglehold on vehicle license plate production will no longer stop the distribution of LTO-produced plates. Motorists pay for the license plates upon the registration of vehicles, yet fail to get the items paid for.

The Duterte administration, for which the anti-crime campaign is a top priority, should have a special interest in seeing to it that the license plates are distributed ASAP. The lack of licence plates has abetted crime, with criminals using fake license plates on getaway vehicles especially motorcycles.

Transport officials must make sure that the LTO plates will bear the necessary security features to prevent faking. The current license plates look easy to fake using pentel pen on white cardboard. LTO officials can make the security features more discernible.

With a solution apparently found for the license plate problem, the LTO should deal with the other serious backlog – in driver’s license cards. While some progress has been made in this area, many motorists continue to wait for their license cards, with some waiting for nearly two years now. Temporary driver’s license forms are not recognized even by certain government offices. This atrocious wait for driver’s license cards must end.