Monday, May 15, 2006

Of drunk drivers and vanity plates

From today's Virginian Pilot: "Virginia Beach attracts an unusually large number of drunken drivers. About 10 percent of all drunken drivers in the state are caught in Virginia Beach. By comparison, the city has about 6 percent of the state's population. Virginia Beach has a disproportionate number because it is a tourism center and because it is the locality with the state's second-largest number of businesses that serve alcohol. Only Fairfax County in Northern Virginia has more."

On NPR this morning I heard that, "In Virginia, 1.4 million cars -- nearly one in five -- sport a personalized plate."
The Washington Post cited the following reason for the popularity, "It costs an extra $10 a year to get a vanity plate in Virginia, compared with the charges in some states, which can reach hundreds of dollars. Virginia also makes it easy to do online, where drivers can test combinations to see whether their favorite is available." You can read the full article here.

A quick Google image search yielded this awesome VA plate...

3 comments:

Templeton said...

That is an awesoem plate. I have seen similarly awesoem plates around here. I was takign pictures of them, but it got to be too much.

Carol Ann said...

Coming from NJ, the inordinate number of vanity license plates I was assaulted with when I got to VA was pretty obnoxious. I suppose I'd have one too if it was that cheap here, but 98.9% of all vanity places are completely assinine.

There was a girl in my learning community who was Miss Virginia Beach 1997. Her license plate? MSVABCH97. Or something of that ilk. Now, that WAS 1997, so I asked her what she was going to get on her car in 1998.

The whole thing bummed me out.

Vanity plates just bum me out. So much pressure to express yourself in 8 or less characters.

I heard about a guy in Virginia Beach once that had his vanity plates revoked because he chose to use "Cyclon B" which is "tradename of a cyanide-based insecticide notorious for its use by Nazi Germany to kill over one million people in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Majdanek" (from wikipedia). It took a while for someone to notice & do something about it.

Again. Vanity plates bum me out.

Anonymous said...

I heard the other day that there is a German mouse trap that is basically a miniature gas chamber.