A plan to color swap vehicle license plates to aid traffic law enforcement, which has been in the works for a few years, will likely go ahead next month, the National Police’s traffic department said.
Private vehicles in Indonesia currently sport license plates featuring white text on black background. Under the proposed changes, the new license plates will feature black text on white background.
“Hopefully, we can roll it out next month,” Brigadier General Yusri Yunus, who heads the Registration and Identification Directorate at the Indonesian Traffic Police, said.
Yusri noted that police will begin gradually replacing the license plates throughout Indonesia next month. Vehicles at the end of their five-year STNK (vehicle registration documents) validity will be among the first given the white license plates upon renewal of the documents. There will be no extra charge for the white license plates.
For the next few years, vehicles with black license plates will not be sanctioned as long as the relevant documents are still valid.
Traffic police proposed the license plate color swap way back in 2018. It said that CCTV cameras and other electronic law enforcement systems occasionally struggle to read current license plates.
This, of course, begs the question: wouldn’t it be more economical and practical to replace those cameras instead?
