Your number's up.

France will go into a new Dark Age. Starting in 2009 new vehicle registrations will be in place. The current system has licence plates with a two digit code at the end that signifies the département (regional adminstrative area) of the current owner, for instance 1111-XY-95, with the 95 signifying one of the suburbs of Paris (see example alongside). The new brain child of some egoistic bureaucrat in the Interior Ministry will no longer require designations of automobile owners' home district, but geographic appellations will be voluntary. The new plates, to be adopted over time, will instead follow the life of the vehicle. Like a born-on date, every new automobile in France will have a licence plate specific to the vehicle. Automobiles will keep their licence plates even if they are sold or their owner moves to a new part of the country. The coming design has two letters followed by three numbers followed by two letters. With 13 million address changes per year, the current system is running out of new combinations. Owners may chose to add numbers and regional logos to the right side of the plate, indicating a specific place, and people will be free to choose any location they wish for their license plates.The new registration model is the same as that successfully introduced in 1994 in Italy; now administrative ideas from Italy are not usually those to recommend. If vehicles currently licensed are not sold they can keep their current registrations. So, France will have a dual system for many years to come. Interesting.

The current plants have been unchanged in structure since heaven knows when and are as much France as are baguettes, Gauloises, frogs legs, and berets. One of the fun aspects of travelling the roads of France is to hail vehicles from the same area, similar to what is possible in Barbados with the letters of the parishes, or in the US and Canada with the state or provincial plates. Under the current system vehicle owners must re-register their vehicle if they relocate permanently to another département. There used to be a once-per-year tax on cars, called the vignette, whose rate depended on the département. This tax now exists only for corporate-owned vehicles (and there exist exemptions for small numbers of vehicles); it is thus no longer important to know the département of a car on sight. Furthermore, computerized files allow large national databases to be maintained without the need for them to be split at local level. A side effect of the vehicle tax system was that many corporations registered their vehicles in départements, such as Marne (51), with lower rates. Regulations aimed at preventing such schemes were passed in 1999.

But is this change necessary? Many schemes exist for knowing the uniqueness of a vehicle, not least its chassis number, which is usually located prominently and visibly near the dashboard. Technology also allows for many forms of electronic tracing or registration without the need to invent new licence plates. Some French people mentioned to me that bureaqucrats like to leave their trace. It was funny when the new designs were shown to a French government minister this week: he asked where was the département number, and had the system explained to him. No. He was not happy and was not going to change. Who did the bureaucrats talk to?

Still, with 7.5 percent unemployment in France and a tendency to complain it's understandable that this fluffy system is around. New jobs. New reasons to groan.