License to Express Yourself

Taking a brief break from all these recent multi-part posts, there was a DCist item stemming from a news story this morning that says that Virginians lead the nation in vanity license plate usage:

"It is the language of the license plate, and no people in America speak it more fervently than those in Virginia, where 1.4 million cars - nearly one in five - sport a personalized plate."

(The article's florid but maddeningly imprecise prose leads me to think that they mean the vanity plate adoption rate -- about 20% -- instead of total users, though it's hard to say.)

Here in the Commonwealth of Virginia, a vanity tag is only $10 extra per year, and I certainly have noticed a lot of them on the road. A quick poll of the parking lot certainly shows a lot of them, many of them appropriately geeky-references for the tech crowd.

Now, it's not just low prices, since the article states that vanity tags in Florida are $12 extra per year, yet only account for 1.1% of all registered plates, which suggests that it's a cultural thing -- you get a vanity tag because everyone else has one.

However, I'm not going to try to turn this into some tortured metaphor about blogging and how seeing other people's blogs make you want to do a blog yourself, etc. Though I do note that they are both forms of self-expression.

Personally, I don't have a vanity tag -- I like the plausible deniablity factor in case I ever run into someone whom I have wronged on the road ("Er, that must have been some other red hatchback that cut you off because I, I mean, he, didn't check his blind spot.").

Thanks -- Joe

Tag: license plates, vanity tags