New Taipei City plans to temporarily halt the replacement of building number plates after a newly unveiled design met with public criticism, the New Taipei City Government said yesterday.
The New Taipei City Department of Civil Affairs on Wednesday unveiled the new plates, saying that the city’s 1.2 million number plates would be completely replaced by February next year.
The current green plates have been in use for 23 years, and many of them are faded to the point of being illegible, it said.
Photo: CNA
The new design implemented a two-color scheme — odd numbers in purple and even numbers in orange — intended to make it easier to differentiate between even and odd-numbered buildings, the department said.
Plates for different areas incorporated images of an area’s iconic structures or sites, it said, adding that the final design had been the result of online votes from the public and the input of designers.
On Thursday, the city began changing over to the new plates, but city residents who found it difficult to distinguish between the colors complained, the department said, adding that the color scheme made the plates difficult to read.
At a news conference on Friday, New Power Party legislators said that running the color combinations through a color-accessibility Web site showed that the odd-numbered plates — purple numbers on a white background — were difficult to read for people who have difficulty distinguishing between blue and green.
The Web site showed that the even-numbered plates — orange numbers on a white background — were even difficult to read for those with normal eyesight, the legislators said.
Possible dangers include traffic accidents as drivers struggle to read number plates and slower rescue times for emergency response personnel, they added.
City residents expressed their discontent on the city government’s Facebook page.
“Can I refuse to change my number plate?” one person asked, while another person wrote: “The old number plates have been in use for 50 years and are much more recognizable than these new ones!”
The city government yesterday said the designer has already been instructed to redesign the plates using the same teal-blue color of the original plates.
The manufacturer would absorb the NT$470,000 spent on the 6,940 plates delivered, it added.
The plates need to be replaced because they were not replaced after Taipei County became a special municipality in 2010, department Director Ko Ching-chung (柯慶忠) said.
Stickers were affixed to the old plates to add the district name and cover up the town and city name, he said, adding that many of those stickers have worn off.
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