Many Drivers Fail to Be Upfront With License Plates

Dear Street Smart:

A large percentage of cars, particularly new cars and particularly “cool cars” (like Miatas and Camaros) seem to be ignoring California’s requirement that vehicles have front license plates. Although clearly such plates do distract from the aesthetics, is it really a choice not to have one?

If a driver is cited for not having a front plate, is it a “fix it” violation? It seems to me that there can’t be many citations written or there wouldn’t be so many obvious violations.

Henry DuBois

Fountain Valley

Although he has no statistics to prove it, Keith Thornhill, a spokesman for the California Highway Patrol in Santa Ana, shares your perception of this as a growing problem.

Because the front license mounts are not obvious, he said, many people choose to ignore them.

This is a problem in two respects: Driving a car without a front license plate is, as you suggest, a violation of state law. And second, Thornhill said, it makes identifying a car involved in a crime or traffic accident more difficult.

“Although it seems like a minor detail to a lot of people,” Thornhill said, “if a family member were run down by a vehicle where someone had a clear view of its front and it had no license plate, I think the minor detail might seem quite a bit more important.”

The CHP regularly cites drivers for operating vehicles without front license plates.

Enforcement is probably not helped by the fact that driving without both license plates is, indeed, only a “fix-it” crime. Each Municipal Court district sets its own penalty. In Municipal Court in Santa Ana, for example, first-time offenders are given 35 to 40 days to fix the problem, after which they are charged a $10 processing fee, according to a district spokeswoman. Those who don’t comply in the allotted time must pay an additional $77.

Dear Street Smart:

On Culver Drive (between Walnut Avenue and Irvine Center Drive) in Irvine, they just completed an underpass at the railroad tracks. How much did it cost?

It seems to be an expensive project for little return. The time that traffic was stopped for Amtrak trains didn’t constitute much more of a delay than a traffic signal. What was the justification for such an expenditure? It almost seems like some pork barrel project.

Luis Villalobos

Irvine

Not by a long shot, according to Arya Rohani, Irvine’s transportation manager. In fact, he said, anyone wondering whether the project was needed should look no further than last week’s accident near Chicago in which five teen-agers were killed after a train struck their bus at a railroad crossing.

“My first reaction on hearing the news was total sorry,” Rohani said. “My second reaction was, thank God that our City Council was able to get the funds to get this underpass built.”

Those funds, by the way, amounted to $20 million--$5 million from the city’s Measure M monies, and the rest from state and private sources.

It was precisely to avoid calamities like the one in Chicago, Rohani said, that the underpass was built. In the past two years, he said, train crossings at the site have increased from 18 to 30 a day, and with rail travel still on the upswing countywide, that number is likely to increase.

Several years ago a woman was killed at the site when her car became stuck on the tracks and she couldn’t get out in time to avoid a collision. More recently, two drivers barely escaped injury in a similar accident that totaled their cars. And even during construction, Rohani said, city workers had to make an emergency trip to the crossing to fix a safety gate that had ceased functioning.

While there was some opposition to the project before it was completed, he said, most people now seem to understand its value. “What I’ve heard so far has been nothing but positive,” Rohani said, “even from former critics of the project.”

Street Smart appears Mondays in The Times Orange County Edition.