Spoke with a friend of mine who is a traffic judge in Pasadena. He confirmed that passenger cars are required to have a license plate in the front and the back. The DMV instruction you reference is specific to motorcycles and trailers. He said that if you only got one plate, the DMV screwed up, and that you should be contacting them to have new plates issued. I asked what would happen if somebody tried using this defense in front of him, and he told me that after 15+ years of doing this work he had never had anybody come before him with a no front license plate ticket; by the time it got to him, it had become a Failure to Appear. At that time, if the party could not show compliance with the law, they paid a fine for the Failure to Appear and had that on their record. I asked what he would do if somebody came in front of him with this argument, and he used the word "specious". He also said that if the person continued to push it, the "BAA" principle would be invoked, and fines and other ramifications would be suitably adjusted (get worse).
I asked whether he thought a police officer tasked with signing off on a no front plate ticket would buy the argument that only one plate had been received, therefore a front plate wasn't required, and he said he highly doubted it. His thought was that the officer would direct the person to contact the DMV for new plates, and then sign the ticket off once that was accomplished.
That being said, I don't think we're going to convince mptpro of this. And, like him, I hate the look of a front license plate on many vehicles. I've had 3 no plate tickets, two in a parking lot, one while driving. This is in over 40 years of driving (yes, I'm old). Both of the tickets in the parking lot were in the same parking lot, and occurred within the last 18 months. So, I've learned where I need to have a plate, and where I don't. I'm going to use the "suction cup" method suggested by another poster on this thread whenever I park in that lot (almost every day), and have the plate in the trunk the rest of the time. If I get a ticket, then I'll put the plate on, get it signed off, pay my fine, and move on. I certainly won't waste my valuable time trying to argue a nuance in the wording from the outside of my license plate envelope to get out of it.
My 2 c worth.....
Keith
