Amazing untapped potential of number plates

If you want to drive a car into London, you have to pay a congestion charge.  Happily, you can do so in about one minute, using your mobile phone, tablet or desktop computer.

Google the subject, go to the site and enter the registration number.  Pay by credit card.  Done.  Swift, simple, no people and no paper.

When you key in the vehicle number  there is an immediate response which shows its make, model, age, colour, insurance status and owner.  Databases know all that for every vehicle, instantly.

It’s amazing how law-abiding everyone becomes when the whole lot is known, and joined up.  Without exception.  In a blink.  And with very little time cost or inconvenience.

So why can’t your PIN be like your number plate,  holding an interconnected record of everything anyone has a right to know about you.  No more forms and questionnaires and endless administrative complication and time cost-for a bank account, a mobile phone, a car log book, a licence, a permit, a title deed, service utilities, passport renewal or whatever.

Just key in your PIN and a password that gives your permission, and any supplier will have instant and complete access to the (selective) information the law entitles them to.  

ROBUST DATA

Computers do all the crunching and privacy categorising, and keep a permanent digital record to guarantee an audit trail that will keep everybody honest-including the administrators.

And if things can be joined up per person, they can also be joined up for all the people and provide a treasure chest of national statistics for planners and the general public.  

As a non-contentious example, we could know the total number of vehicles, their class proportions, age - and anything else about them of use, interest or importance at the push of a button.

There are lots of reasons why we need to know more about our national fleet of vehicles with four wheels or more.  But robust data is somewhere between scant, inconsistent and non-existent.

We have to resort to extrapolation, a bit like this: In the past decade, all Kenya’s main motor companies have sold about 140,000 new vehicles of every shape and size from town runabouts to prime mover trucks.

That figure represents about 10 per cent (maybe) of today’s total national road-going fleet of things with four wheels or more.   The average age of that portion is about 5 years.

Over the same period, there have been about 860,000 used imports mostly aged about 8 years on arrival. 

The average age of that contingent today is therefore around 13 years. Put both groups together and you have a million vehicles with an average age of about 12 years. 

The rest of the fleet about 400,000 -  was already here 10 years ago, having arrived in much the same new-used proportions.   So that segment’s average age was also around 12, and is therefore now around 22.

With some slightly trickier arithmetic, we can therefore estimate that the overall average age of all the vehicles in Kenya today is  about 15 years.  That’s not a precise fact, but it is a strongly indicative probability.