An order to stick radio frequenzy identification tags onto new motorcycles has been put on hold by the Phillipines’ Land Transportation Office.
The RFID tags would allow police to positively identify motorcycles at traffic stops and would assist in enforcing motor vehicle fines and in combatting motorcycle theft.
In the Phillipines, all motor vehicles are to be tagged by the end of October 2010, but the tagging of motorcycles was slated to start on Monday. That’s been moved up to Feb. 15, because while RFI tags could be placed in the windshields of cars and trucks, there’s some confusion about where to place them on motorcycles.
There are other problems with the Phillipine project: their National Telecommunications Commission has complained that they have not given clearance to use these radio devices, and other public bodies have said the whole tagging issue has not gone through proper regulatory processes. Some have also complained that they would violate privacy rights.
But RFID may be the way of the future. Honda’s Italian subsidiary has used them to track components in motorcycle and automobile production, and in Bermuda, an experiment found that police can reliably use RFI tags to identify motorcycles on the road. However, cost issues raised some doubts about the effectiveness of using RFI on motorcycles as a way of collecting revenue through fines for such offences as improper parking.
