The Idle Pen: Michigan Madness

Familiar with Michigan license plates? The white on blue design has been in use since...well, a very long time ago, and I've been mighty familiar with it myself from my uncountable visits to Michigan relatives and vacation destinations over the last twenty-odd years. But that's all to be a thing of the past before long. This year, the state of Michigan is replacing its license plates. Uh oh.

Without further ado, the typical Michigan license plate of 1982 to 2006, and its supposedly "improved" replacement (both the official sample, and a self-made facsimile of what the actual plate format looks like):

Supposedly, the justification for this happening is to improve legibility for law enforcement. I'd dispute this: You can't get much better contrast than white on dark blue. Granted, some of the blue plates on Michigan roads are in lousy condition, but many more are in great shape and all have worn pretty well considering that they're made of rustable steel and have been subjected to as many as 25 winters deep in the salt belt. Why not keep the existing design, and replace illegible plates selectively through vehicle inspections or the like? (Never mind; the state doesn't have them).

Not to mention that the serial format is definitely a step down in the readability department: Most of the old plates have six characters stamped with large, easy-to-read dies, while all the new ones will have seven less-easily-memorized characters in very narrow, over-stylized ones. I challenge you to step back twenty feet from your monitor and see which of the license plate images above can still be read.

To be frank: The new plates are butt-ugly and as boring as the Ohio Turnpike. I always liked the colors and simplicity of the old ones, which I thought evoked the blue of the Great Lakes very well; the color scheme was unique, and the stamped captions and glass-bead reflectorization were all a part of their charm. The new ones are reversed: Blue characters on a white background, which also happens to be the color scheme used by twenty-eight or twenty-nine other states and provinces. There are absolutely no distinctive elements in the composition whatsoever aside from a tacky and impersonal slogan in a generic-looking font: "www.Michigan.gov." Since I ranted about the wisdom of putting website URLs on license plates the last time around, I won't go into depth here, but you'd think that the Great Lake State and Water Wonderland could come up with a slogan that promoted itself with a bit more imagination and enthusiasm.

The white on blue plate may have been the most common, but it's not the only thing falling by the wayside. As a means of leaving no stone unturned, the extra-cost Mackinac Bridge issue (fig. 4) is also being replaced with a new design (fig. 5). Unlike with the blue plates, the state doesn't intend to replace existing bridge plates in use (although paradoxically enough many of these are wearing worse than the blues on the roads), and to be honest the new design isn't that bad, but it still leaves a number of things to be desired. The state name is printed in small letters that effectively blur themselves out from more than a few feet away, and the design itself is practically identical to that of Mississippi (fig. 6), the state two places down in the alphabet. Perhaps this is intended as an allusion to where Michigan jobs have gone to? Heh.

On the heels of all this, the Michigan license plate re-issue comes at a time when the state's deficits are in a crisis and its economic picture is at a standstill. Meanwhile, the plates themselves have been cranked out so quickly that half of them were made with bolt holes punched in the wrong place before the problem was noticed and rectified some time after the fact. So many characteristics of the procedure have been botched, and they probably won't even succeed in replacing all the plates this year: I spotted a white-on-blue plate renewed with a "JAN 2008" sticker just a couple weeks ago, so it's inevitable that some will (hopefully) slip through the cracks.

Long live Old Blue!

The Network License Plates The Idle Pen

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©2007 Andrew Turnbull.
Last update February 10, 2007.