New Ad Proposal a License to Scare

You have to hand it to California. You really do. They're big. They're bold. And that's just the governor.

Seriously, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has just served notice that he's going to punish the state's lawmakers indirectly for not submitting a budget — by cutting the pay of 200,000 state workers to the federal minimum wage. (For those who haven't been on the minimum wage in awhile, it's up to $7.25 an hour.) Schwarzenegger promised that the workers would be paid their full salaries retroactively, once the budget gets signed.

The budget is overdue and probably won't be popular in any event. (Such squabbles are nothing new in California.) The deficit stands to be about $19 billion.

The governor's minimum-wage plan won't come anywhere near that type of savings, but fear not: other proposals are being bandied out, including this one:

One idea is to take one of California's prime assets, the sheer crush of cars and trucks on the road, and turn it into a money-making machine. How? By turning license plates into digital billboards.

Seems someone has had the bright idea (and enough people have approved of this bright idea to keep it moving forward) of converting the static face of a license plate into a digital screen that can broadcast advertisements. So now, when you're stuck in traffic, stalled on the highway in an unmoving queue of vehicles, you can entertain yourself by being impressed by the ad on the license plate on the car in front of you. With luck, the display will employ a rolling ad scheme, so that your anticipation of what's coming next can build and maybe even make you break out into a cold sweat (assuming that you haven't already done this from the static nature of your own vehicle because of the traffic jam).

All good, right? Companies should be lining up to pour wads of cash into the hands of the California State Treasury in order to buy face time on a million different license plates. That kind of money would surely double in an election year — which seems to be every year nowadays.

What's to stop this grand plan? How about … safety? Can you imagine the kind of havoc that would be wrecked (pun intended) by drivers trying to get close enough to the car in front of them to see what's being advertised? Yes, it's a good idea to keep your eyes on the vehicle in front of you (especially if that vehicle is a big truck). It's also a good idea to keep glancing in the rearview mirror and keep looking to either side (Remember that peripheral vision that side mirrors can give?). Every distraction can cost seconds, damages, and lives. That goes for changing the radio station, picking a new playlist from the MP3 player, taking or making a mobile phone call (legal only in some states now), or otherwise taking your brain and wits away from their primary vocation when you're driving: keeping yourself alive.

Presumably, the digital ads will be controlled by some sort of frequency, meaning Wi-Fi or cellular transmitter or something like that. One shudders to think what an opportunity that would be for a hacker. Surely all political parties have access to people with such skills. The more frightening thought is hackers with access to indecent advertising. Talk about causing disruptions on the road!

Times are tough, belts needed to be tightened, and California has a veritable army of drivers on the road at any given time. But placing digital advertisements on license plates isn't a responsible way to make money (if responsibility is defined as putting safety first).