New cars to have extra letter on plates

The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Tue, 09/16/2008 10:18 AM | Headlines

Vehicle ownership in Jakarta is growing at such a rate that the Jakarta Police traffic division has run out of combinations for registration numbers.

Numbers for new cars registered from September 2008 will have a third letter added.

"We've been implementing the new policy since last week," Sambodo Purnomo, the head of the vehicle ownership documents unit said over the weekend.

He said the change was made because of the rapid growth in new car sales.

Current license plate numbers for cars start with 0, 1, 2, 7 or 8, while those for pickups start with 9. Plate numbers for motorcycles start with 4, 5 or 6. The four-number combination is followed by a two-letter combination.

"We have run out of combinations of four numbers (and two letters) for cars, which were randomly picked from AA to ZZ. So the solution is to change the vehicle registration system to include three letters," Sambodo said.

A newly registered car, for example, will get a plate number of B xxxx AAA. The new three-letter combination will only apply to new cars registered from this month. There will be no changes for formerly registered cars.

The two-letter combination, he said, had been in use for about 30 years.

He said three letters had been used for motorcycle registrations for the past two years.

As of September this year, there are six million motorcycles in the city, with new registration documents for about 1,500 new motorcycles and 500 new cars processed by the city police every day.

According to traffic division data, there were more than 9 million vehicles in the city as of June 2008.

Of those, 20.8 percent are private cars, 5.4 percent are trucks, 3.2 percent are buses and 69.2 are motorcycles.

With the number of vehicles growing on average at 9 percent per year, the city's roads -- with a total length of 7,650 kilometers and width of 40.1 square kilometers -- are heavily occupied.

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