Plates? We don't need no stinkin' plates....

About a week or two ago, I noticed a white Ford Taurus ('92 to '95, if my car memory serves me right) parked on a side street near my apartment with no license plates on it. Not a big deal, as it's off to the side, and people who never move their cars, or whose cars are incapable of moving under their own power, park there. A couple days ago, though, I noticed it parked on my street - a very busy, densly populated street, where it has been for the last couple days. That kind of irks me. At first, this was only because it was one more car competing for parking, but after some thought I came to realize it's because of more than that.

The first of this is that the owner isn't paying license and registration fees like the rest of us, myself included. Not a big deal, just a couple hundred dollars a year or so. But in order to get registration, you need insurance, and I would doubt that someone with no plates on his car would have insurance. In the city, that's a serious chunk of change. My insurance bill is around $340 a month. That's almost as much as my car payments. It means that I work for about one month every year just to pay the insurance on my car. And it's not like I'm an awful driver or drive a rimmed out Bentley or something. I drive an almost-3-year old Chrysler, have no accidents on my record, and one speeding ticket about 4 years ago. But because I'm 23, and live in the city, I pay enough auto insurance every year to buy myself a plasma TV every year. A decent one too, not one of those Korean plasmas made by some company you can't pronounce. And this guy gets to share the same street as me without these expenses, his empty license plate area leering at me like an evil grin as I walk from parking like a block away.

This insurance thing is why I would love to move to a REAL no-fault system, where eveyone pays for their own repairs and injuries. I worked for an insurance company for two summers while in college, and I saw some rediculous shit. If you drive, you take a risk, like anything else in life. If someone hits the brakes a second too late and taps your Toyota, suck it up and pay for it. I hate seeing my hard earned money go to paying off people who look at collisions as an opportunity instead of an unfortunate accident.