Auto registration dodgers hurt everyone
A solution’s needed. Now.
It’s very close to being a daily event — sometimes, there are several in a single night.
There were four on a Saturday night two weeks ago. And there’s no sign that it’s going to be different any time soon.
In the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary’s morning news releases about their calls overnight, it’s now practically boilerplate: “RNC Operational Patrol Services conducted a traffic safety stop in the west end of St. John’s near Empire Avenue. As a result, a 19-year-old female was charged under the Highway Traffic Act with failure to transfer ownership of her vehicle, expired registration, no insurance, and driving while suspended. The driver was released but her vehicle was impounded.”
Someone buys a cheap older car with a recentlyrenewed registration and licence plate sticker, and then purposefully doesn’t register the fact that ownership has changed. The previous owner has no idea that their old vehicle is now running around the city, still officially in their name, with no insurance and no valid registration. Sometimes, the police catch the illegal drivers. Sometimes, nothing happens until an unregistered, uninsured vehicle ends up in an accident.
Often, the drivers involved have built up a history of charges and unpaid fines for doing the same thing over and over again.
It costs us all in increased insurance costs, let alone the fact that, given you’re operating a vehicle that will have its stickers run out in less than a year, servicing and new tires may not be something you’re interested in actually investing in. Roadworthiness may be less important than running it into the ground and then just picking up another cheap “beater,” even if the reason someone’s selling it for cheap is because of major maintenance issues you don’t intend to fix.
We’ve said this before: the provincial government has to find a more effective way to ensure that the licensing and insurance system can’t be so easily bypassed.
One way? Sellers could be required to notify the provincial Registry of Motor Vehicles by email when they make a sale.
More effectively, the licence plates for the vehicle could come off a car at the time of sale and either remain with the seller or be turned in, leaving the new owner of an obviously-unplated vehicle a limited amount of time to head to the registry and set things right.
A combination of those two moves would make registration-dodgers remarkably easy for police to spot.
But continuing to operate the same way, with a situation such that offenders build up such a backlog of fines that they could never pay them off, nor effectively ever be able to buy a vehicle legally? It’s easy to predict what RNC news releases will say, on into the future.
There has to be a better way.