There was no visible evidence that the SUV traveling in front of us on a New York interstate had a license plate.
An opaque tarp was draped over bicycles that were hanging from a rack on the tailgate.
To be fair, it was lightly raining as we were returning to Pennsylvania from a weekend trip to the Hudson Valley. To be blunt, that’s their problem.
“You can’t even see the license plate,” my wife observed
The more I thought about it, the angrier I got.
My inner police reporter conjured terms like “toll evader.”
If you don’t have an E-ZPass transponder in the vehicle, you get billed by the toll authorities by mail — unless the plate readers were unable to read the registration numbers.
Toll evaders install license plate covers that intentionally obscure the numbers, making it impossible for automatic license plate readers to record them.
Cheating tolls probably wasn’t the intention of the offending motorist. For all I knew, they had a transponder stuck to the windshield.
Still, with a flagrant vehicle code offense playing out before me for miles, I fumed.
How has that vehicle made it this far without being pulled over for such a flagrant violation? Isn’t that how they finally caught Ted Bundy?
If that were the only “display of license plates” violation I observed on this three-hour ride, this column may not have been conceived. Or so I say.
Traveling through New Jersey, we encountered another plate-obscuring bike rack.
Although not as egregious as the first violation, the frame of the rack had a puffy fabric covering that perfectly hid the alphanumeric characters on the plate.
I’m sure New York and New Jersey have vehicle codes similar to Pennsylvania’s as they relate to display of registration plates.
Pennsylvania’s Title 75, Section 1332 states it is unlawful to display on any vehicle a registration plate which:
• Is so dirty as to prevent the reading of the number or letters thereon at a reasonable distance.
• Is illegible, obscured, covered or otherwise obstructed in any manner which inhibits the proper operation of any other automated enforcement system or electronic toll collection system.
• Tinted plate covers.
You’ve probably been behind a vehicle at a red light bearing a license plate covered with a tinted cover. You can’t discern whether the plate was issued by Pennsylvania, Delaware, Kentucky or Alaska.
Like all vehicle code violations, police have wide discretion in how they handle obstructed license plates.
They can issue a citation, which carries a $100 fine not including fees, or, in the case of a faded plate, a warning with a deadline to get a new plate from PennDOT, Trooper Ethan Brownback, public information officer for Troop L, told me.
“I pulled a dump truck over years ago,” he said. “The contents had been leaking out over the license plate. It was becoming illegible.”
Source: Berkshire mont