Street-smart with front license plates

Depending on where you live, you may or may not be required to have a license plate on the front of your vehicle – 31 states do. Having front and rear plates can help keep you safer, significantly increase law enforcement officers’ ability to apprehend criminals and add to your state’s revenue.

In the U.S., the first vehicle license plate laws emerged more than a century ago. In 1901, New York became the first state to require car owners to create “plates” — which may have been made of wood or leather or simply painted on the car — displaying the owner’s initials. Two years later, Massachusetts began issuing numbers to registered owners and by 1910, distributed the first state-issued plates. Since then, a vehicle license plates’ importance has increased well beyond simple owner identification.  View the U.S. License Plate Reference Guide (PDF, 3.7 MB).

Paramount to avoiding traffic accidents is recognition of oncoming traffic or parked vehicles. In fact, front license plates that use reflective sheeting return light from other vehicles’ headlights, making oncoming vehicles easier to see in the daytime, at night, in tunnels, and in other less than optimal environments. The license plate may be the only reflectivity on the front of a vehicle. Seeing a vehicle more quickly allows drivers to better react in the case of stalled or crashed vehicles as well as changes in the traffic ahead, helping to decrease the chance for an accident.

The Texas A&M Transportation Institute study² (PDF, 756 KB) determined that front plates improve readability rates, and not having a front license plate hampers homeland security efforts. In a summary of the study results, it was noted that:
 

• When parked, two-plate vehicles had a better license plate read rate than one-plate vehicles, 97 percent read rate for two-plate states versus 76 percent in one-plate states. (page 4)
• When moving, two-plate states (Maryland and Texas) had a read rate of 89%, and for one-plate states (Pennsylvania and Arizona) it was 22% and 58% on roadways connecting Maryland and Pennsylvania. (page 4)
• U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that the number of plates not read (excluded) on vehicles without two plates was 6% across the northern border and 3.4% across the southern border, noting that the difference between international borders is the presence of dual plate states between the U.S. and Mexico.” (page 4)

In addition to the Texas A&M study, a representative of the Ohio Conference of AAA Clubs, while speaking before the Ohio House Transportation Committee in 2015, affirmed AAA’s opposition to removing front license plates, citing their role in identifying vehicles involved in many types of crimes including Amber Alerts, speeding and school zone violations, stolen vehicles, kidnapping, robberies and domestic violence.