Complexity is a cost of our federal system and I am okay paying it in most cases.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2026/2024-sta...
That said, I've moved across state lines before and didn't find it that inconvenient. I just had to re-register and do a smog check.
For example: The tint that Florida law allows is way, way darker than what Ohio law allows.
But the Ohio Revised Code has carveouts that make it perfectly legal for Florida Man to drive his darker-tinted Florida-registered car in Ohio.
In my experience there's enough slack in practice for these edge cases. At least in CA, it's very strange for a cop to cite a tourist because their car is not road legal in CA but is road legal in their home state. I've known many people who just get off with warnings, sometimes years after they've actually moved to CA (and just never bothered re-registering their car their, even though that's technically legally required). Ofc YMMV
They do still have to comply with local laws, which makes sense. Just because you have Florida plates does not mean you don’t need all weather tires in Minnesota.
Problem solved.
I seem to remember California was close to or even beating Texas for "percentage of residents who have never left the state."
If you go by the spirit of the law, then a grace period would be reasonable to apply to infrequent visitors. However, you travel there daily, so that does not apply to you.
Doesn’t really seem like you have a leg to stand on here.
If your argument for this law is that it forces people to incriminate themselves, that's really an argument that the whole thing should be thrown out.
Under no circumstances should you be able to be compelled to assist in your own prosecution, either directly or indirectly.
That law has nothing to do with incriminating yourself (it's more about safety), but even if the law was specifically "so someone can see into your window and identify you if you do something bad", that's still not self-incrimination. Self-incrimination is requiring someone to testify against themselves.
Your position boils down to: "I should be able to commit traffic violations anonymously because anything else is an infringement on my 5th amendment rights".
Basically you're saying that any law is invalid if it makes or ensures that any kind of wrongdoing visible to witnesses. That's absurd.
You are requiring someone to take action that will assist in their own prosecution. That is the goal as per your own statements, and is the obvious primary purpose of these laws.
If that is not compelling someone to self-incriminate, what is?
>Basically you're saying that any law is invalid if it makes or ensures that any kind of wrongdoing visible to witnesses. That's absurd.
No, i'm saying that if you make a law whose primary purpose is to assist in the prosection of those who are compelled to follow it, that law is invalid. If you make a law that incidentally requires someone to assist in their own prosecution, then the law may be valid, but the usage of that information in prosecution or investigations is invalid and falls under the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine.
I see no difference between it and compelling people in court to testify against themselves, because the only difference is where the self-incrimination is happening.
Idk about the rest of the country, but in my experience in the southern US it's a pretty common tactic to pull you over for assumed illegal tint to try and catch you for other charges. Especially if you aren't white.
Again, that's just a personal opinion. I could have that opinion about any number of laws and choose to disobey them because of that.
You're certainly entitled to the opinion that the law is indefensible and should never be followed. It's just weird to me for you to treat this like some sort of obvious objective view with no reasonable grounds for disagreement.
The US Supreme Court recognizes a general principle that you can transit a State with things that are illegal in that State. An individual State cannot impose a de facto ban on commerce between States, which includes the right to transport goods through a State in the normal fashion regardless of the laws of that State.
The court viewed this as unconstitutional interference in the commerce between the origin and destination States, which seems correct on its face. There must be evidence of intent to distribute the firearms in the State where they are illegal. This case created a safe harbor for mere transport of goods between States.
Cannabis is different because it violates Federal law. It is technically illegal everywhere even though it is legal under State law in many locales. The Federal government has chosen to not enforce this law in States where it is legal, largely because enforcement could create a Constitutional case that could bring into question Federal authority to enact those and many other laws.
There are all sorts of laws that apply in one place but not others. Why do you think tint or vehicles should get special treatment?
If I buy legal weed in Colorado and take it into Utah, it doesn’t matter that I’m not an Utah resident, and that the weed is legal where I bought it.
The same one that needed me to show them the smog sticker to show that I didn't need to do a smog check ... for my out-of-state Model 3
https://www.estartcoalition.org/
I suspect eSTART is... a start to what you're looking for.
So many Californians live in valleys that trap pollution. Strict emissions regulations have an immediate, tangible impact. South Carolina doesn’t have the same local issues and their standards vary. Likewise, tint stuff is mostly a police / safety issue, and is more of a problem in major metro areas. High tint is an issue in the Bronx. Not so much in rural Alabama.
I’d argue that the worst part of the system we have now is that we have a weird hybrid as disenfranchisement has become a political priority. Integration between states is driven by compacts between states and Canadian provinces and mediated through private entities like AAMVA and NLETS. That has facilitated other sharing agreements with insurers and other entities that is a serious and significant privacy violation.
We should be able to get a free passport card for identity, and make driving privilege licensure, vehicle registration, etc a purely state matter.
I wear a cheap disposable N95 mask when I walk along busy streets, which filters out probably at least 98% of the particulates. (The "95" in "N95" stands for 95%, but that is 95% of the particles that are hardest to filter: both smaller particles and larger particles are easier to filter. So since it is quite unlikely that all or most of the particles produced by brakes and tires are precisely the size that is hardest to filter, I estimate that my cheap $2 mask that can be reused for dozens walks is probably filtering at least 98%.)
In contrast noise pollution and tailpipe pollution and fuel-tank-evaporation pollution are much harder to filter (at least for pedestrians on the move) so a drastic reduction in one and a complete elimination of the other two is an extremely welcome development.
Specifically, the gaseous pollution from tailpipes and fuel tanks is composed of many hundreds of different compounds, many of which can be effectively absorbed by filtration media, but many of which cannot be. I don't bother to try to filter it out when I walk along busy streets because the filtration media makes the mask much bulkier and heavier than my N95 masks are and because the filtration media costs more (even plain activated carbon, the cheapest and most useful media for gases) and remains effective for a much shorter duration before it must be replaced.
We won't even be at 50% electric in 5 years. I doubt we'll even be at 50% of cars being sold being electric in 5 years.
There's a reason there are 50 states and not just one federal land. The needs of the people of Montana are definitely different than the needs of New Yorkers, so expecting the two states to have the same laws is just illogical. It's also why things like the electoral college is a thing to prevent the population centers dictating what the rural people have to do.
Plenty of other countries with rural areas seem to do fine without one. They also usually have much better / more granular representation, instead of a hard cap of 435 for a population that is orders of magnitude larger than at the country’s founding.
That’s why the more reactionary elements in our society have placed such a priority on making the federal government ineffective.
There are entities that are federal registrations (eg: an aircraft with an "N-number" -- that N-number is federal) that individual states still try really hard to tax the same way as cars/trucks. Individual counties even take a stab at this.
It seems that the rules might be there for some benefit but mostly the rules help the state/county make income.
No. Each state needs the power to set minimum standards as to who can drive what. I don't want to see millionaires be allowed to drive around without insurance in unsafe cars simply because their daddy purchased them a share in a Delaware family-held plates LLC.
What if gun owners had to walk around wearing a huge plate with their gun registration number when they wanted to carry a gun?
And why do driver’s licenses have all sorts of extraneous info (all you need is a biometric, like a photo, expiration date, class of license, and any restrictions)? Just because I walked into a bar or bought a beer at the supermarket doesn’t mean they should be allowed to harvest my address, DOB etc.
The whole edifice is absurd.
You have zero right to a car. It is a privilege, one that you should be able to lose a lot easier.
> You have zero right to a car. It is a privilege, one that you should be able to lose a lot easier.
Do I have a right to feed myself and my family?
If yes, is that right absolute or relative?
If absolute, and my ability to feed requires me to commute in a car, is having a car a right or a privilege?
Next, assume I cannot use my legs and need an electric wheelchair to move around. Do I have a right to an electric wheelchair? What if that electric wheelchair has 50 miles of range which is more than sufficient for my daily commute and more.
Am I now at an advantage compared to a person who needs a car for that exact same commute?
No matter what other thought experiment you create, you do not have a right to drive a car in the US, it can be revoked quite easily.
But hey, I'm sure you're the first to vote against any measures that would actually improve things like urban density or public transportation.
To the contrary.
I don't believe in being punitive and taxing people who live a life different from mine or hold conflicting beliefs.
I don't believe in lecturing people on how they should live their lives as long as they don't start to lecture me on how I should mine.
If someone wants to live in a rural county and drive to and from work or groceries 20 hours a day, they're welcome to. They are adults.
If someone on the other hand wants to live right next to the train and bus station, so they can take a ride right out of their balcony, they're welcome to do so as well. They are adults.
I do not assume a right over another person's decision and freedom to choose how they want to live their own life as long as they don't tamper with my own. We are adults.
The United States was built on these very ideals: mini, hyper-localized governance than a larger centralized governance that is not in touch with the people they govern.
Unfortunately, that philosophy has been lost to time, and people in coastal cities in California seem to feel perfectly comfortable lecturing ranch hands in Montana what to do and how to live their lives.
That's a common tale of American mythos, but it's not really an accurate portrayal of American history. Hyper-local governance only really existed in New England and never spread outside of it. Most governance centered on states which are--let's be frank--small countries: the median state in population and area is around 40th percentile among world countries, so smaller than average, but not by that much. And if you look throughout the history of states' rights in US history, invariably those advocating for states' rights are bleeding hypocrites. Note that, e.g., when the southern states established the Confederate States of America, they expressly forbid their own states from having the rights they were claiming for themselves in the antebellum period.
Indeed, in many cases, the more localized governance really turns out to just be people who have lost the political debate at the national level, and thus unable to impose their views on everybody, settling for imposing them at the state level and eagerly oppressing those within the jurisdictions where they can win from exercising their differing views.
lol, you were then eaten by a bear of your own making.
You see, when you're deathmobile is f=mv2 down the highway you present a clear and present danger to every one around you. It doesn't matter if your 5, 55 or 95 physics gives zero shits about your libertarian ideas as your broke ass kills 3 people and leaves one a quadriplegic requiring millions of dollars in care for the rest of their miserable life.
>Unfortunately, that philosophy has been lost to time
Yea, guess what happens when you connect the world together so were milliseconds away digitally, and 3 days away from each other with modern travel. Suddenly the dumb shit we do effects everyone around us and in our profound ignorance make the world worse for everyone around us. Hyper-localized doesn't exist unless you want to dump all telecommunications in the trash and burn all the cars and planes the go back to horses.
You act like the founding fathers, if transported to today, would be completely incapable of making logically informed decisions based on the current state of the world, and not a world 250 years in their past.
> and people in coastal cities in California seem to feel perfectly comfortable lecturing ranch hands in Montana
And the people in Montana are perfectly fine with making laws at the federal level that effect people in California.
California has about 732,000 residents per electoral vote, Montana has like 280,000 residents per electoral vote. Despite CA having nearly 40 million people they still only get 2 senators, so their influence in the Senate per voter is 1 vote per 20 million people while Montana senators only have 570,000 people behind each vote.
The rural folk in Wyoming and Montana get far more say relative to their populace on how Californians should live than vice versa.
It's not urban versus rural. That... is just another variation of having more vote proportional to your land. Land doesn't vote, people do. But in the US, land also votes some, which seems ironic given a nation founded in part on getting away from rights largely embued by how much land you own.
It's the qualitative change than comes with the change in quantity and ease of monitoring (and accessibility of that info) that means being identifiable is so much worse now days.
Actually a very sensible proposition.
Do you wear a name tag in public with your SSN, or some unique identifying information on it? If not, why not?
If I asked you to vote on this, would you vote in favor for it?
Why not? People can strangle other people so it makes sense to know who is who at all times in the case that someone strangles someone else and then tries to run away.
If this isn't making sense yet - This is as sensible as expecting software engineers to walk around with equipment that prominently display uniquely identifying information because computers can be used to hack and doxx people.
The fact that license plates were/are necessary is to address shortcomings of technology.
Most states in 2026 are slowly removing the need to display license plates at all because it never made sense but had to be done to address shortcomings that are no longer so in 2026.
Do you have a reference? I have not read this, and California is going the opposite way.
I'm all for privacy for things that are truly private. But wanting to secretly consume public resources and remain unaccountable for harm to others is what I think is truly absurd. Although it's an increasingly popular one recently.
People who claim they want privacy while acting in society instead want something else, usually a lack of accountability.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-road-taxes-fu...
And nobody said anything about wanting to be unaccountable for harm. Rather it's a matter of being vulnerable to ne'er do wells. When we get a US GDPR equivalent with teeth, develop a widespread societal taboo against the surveillance industries, and so on, then we can talk about an equitable tradeoff with accountability for harm. Until then, the dynamic is an overwhelming vulnerability.
As is dramatizing license plates as "overwhelming vulnerability". Just look at the US's 40k traffic deaths per year, with countless lesser injuries and accidents. Balanced against which specific harms of license plates?
The problem with Flock, etc, is their massive, unaccountable, for profit surveillance, which uses much more than license plates, and is working hard to move beyond them.
The specific harms are exemplified by things like Flock, but also individual businesses tracking, private investigators, etc. If you want to stop that harm other ways, I've already agreed that I would find that acceptable. But until something actually changes on that front, it's not really an argument!
Given modern technology, we can imagine different ways that would provide less of a general vulnerability while actually providing more of the accountability you're putting foremost. Imagine say e-ink plates or a radio beacon that rotated the broadcasted identifier every minute, only being linkable through a database with an audit trail, etc.
Tell that to felons. Or people with diagnosed mental health issues of certain types.
The idea of a "right" is hilarious. Whenever you have an entity (like a government) that has the power of force or imprisonment over you, everything is a privilege.
I can't think of very many "rights" that haven't been abridged, curtailed, or violated by governments in ways that have been held to be legal when reviewed by courts.
That's just the US being stupid and using driver's licenses as primary identity documents. (And if you don't have a passport or other ID document, you're part of that problem.)
(Fun fact: I have 2 passports, 1 driver's license and 1 residence permit. None of those have my address. To be fair, they all have my DOB, that's really considered mandatory for any ID document around here.)
A single bumper sticker or distinctive paint color or a dent in the door can be just as immediately identifying as a license plate at that level. Even in places where the plate is always the same for the car and doesn't change when it's sold, it's just a way to tell one vehicle apart from another.
Case in point, my user name is a license plate number of a total stranger, and I imagine you'd be hard pressed to even tell me the color of the car, let alone their name and address. I'm not asking you to doxx someone, but saying it's not trivially easy for the average person, even when considering the boatload of data broker information out there on every individual.
The requirement to identify the vehicle for enforcement of the licensing requirements is not at all strange.
Don't get a license if you don't agree with the requirements for it. Would you be saying the same thing for aircraft?
I think the only reason we enforce showing the plates is so the police can easily see if a vehicle is allowed to be on the roads from their own vehicles during traffic stops. We don't have police out patrolling for gun owners, but if we did I bet we would see more public "gun registration plates" for convenience purposes.
As for drivers licenses at bars, again, it's just convenience. We could split all that info into separate little cards and only show what we need to, but we've collectively decided the risk is very low that a bar or supermarket is going to track our address and DOB as we flash them to buy booze.
That's not "low risk"; that actually happens, a lot. Many bars and supermarkets will scan the barcode on the back of your license when they do the check. Of course everything on it goes into a database to help build a profile about you.
That would be fantastic. Wish we could implement that.
I think as programmers we naturally want a single, universal standard for everything, but there are genuine advantages to having the current system as well, even with all of its flaws.
To rephrase, you're asking that the same license plate work across all of the European Union.
To realize why this is unrealistic, one has to go back to history and understand the core concept of the United States of America. It's right there in the name itself. It was a compromise to unite and bring agreement across all these disparate states that were in their very own right entire countries (and most, even till date, most states in the US continue to be larger, geographically than most countries in the world), agree on some very basic terms so there could be trade across them, kind of like the European Union.
> but this current system is Kafkaesque
Of course, this license plate registration thing was optimized for tax and fee collection, and it does that job very well. All it takes is for someone to run for office and say they're going to overturn it all.
VAT I guess being the interesting part given the original topic.
It would be nice though, if you could just buy a car across the border and drive it home. I doubt the EU will ever be that integrated.
You lost me in the next paragraph where your solution was to centralize even more into a committee that has the power to bulldoze over more locally relevant needs and desires
this is a very local need of some people. they are a minority, and they want some accomodations.
Except no one would buy it, not even Carmax or any of the other "cash for cars" places! Turns out, the car was originally manufactured for Canada, and California doesn't recognize the Canadian smog regulations, even if the car was functionally identical down to the catalytic converter. No one would take the damn thing because they couldn't re-title it. I finally found one guy who would who seemed like he was taking a decent sized risk, but since I gave him a good price he decided he'd just give it his best shot. For all I know he may have had to (illegally) drive it to Nevada just to sell it.
Functionally, that's what already exists - the standards are dimensions and readability. There's no CA smog inspection station as you enter the state, this is about people abusing a loophole. I spent all 4 years of college in CA with a CA driver's license, a car with out of state plates, and zero Kafkaesque issues. Maybe tax avoidance loopholes are Kafkaesque because they're not how anyone is supposed to do things.
As one more wacky way to do it, some countries rivet the license plate to the car because the plates never change. They're basically shorthand for the VIN, so the owner and their place of residence don't matter, only where the car was first registered.
I mean you do have to live close to a (tri-)state border to pull this off, but it’s probably doable.
As a reminder, we’re talking about a (hypothetical) 183-day rule for car registration here (as opposed to the ~30-day one we currently have, which makes loopholes that we discuss here absolutely impractical).
The administration has gradually modernized so that all the legal requirements of tax/registration/insurance can be checked online.
However, there's a loophole that's apparently becoming popular: "ghost plates". Number plates aren't a secure document. They have no authenticity markers. So you can just.. print your own, slap them on, and you're very unlikely to get police attention. A subset of that is plates which are IR scattering so they don't show up on speed cameras.
We don't call fake IDs either a loophole or "ghost IDs". When presented as identity documents, they're fraudulent identity documents. It doesn't matter if that ID is being presented to a bouncer in order to get in to a bar, or to everyone who cares to look at your car's bumper while it drives down the motorway, it's still a fake ID.
Only these are "ghost plates". So called because the letters appear faint, or ghost like, on ANPR cameras.
Using illegal plates, either ghost ones or cloned ones (where they're real plates but for the wrong vehicle) are not loopholes, any more than breaking into someone's house and stealing their stuff is a "loophole" for property ownership.
Pretty sure that's illegal, no? You have 30 days after bringing a car into the state to register it with the CA DMV.
It’s not 30 days it’s 20 but it isn’t “bringing into the state”, it is becoming a resident of the state, and that has more requirements than just showing up for a month.
Considering that half the parking lot of my building was out of state plates, it seems like it's not a huge concern for anyone.
It's mostly a voluntary standard for convenience. You can still get 5.5" x 9.5" plates in Delaware.
Vehicle registrations are just par for the course.
I wish you could just register under an LLC or trust or something wherever and have a generic plate that can go anywhere and force the states to agree on a set of standards that apply across the country.
Alternatively allow people to keep their plates indefinitely like phone numbers. Yes, this creates arbitrage opportunities but maybe we should be bringing up the standards of the arbitrage states instead of having assholes threaten everyone with guns for random infractions.
I'm kinda just throwing ideas out there but this current system is Kafkaesque.