Drawing this map was an educational experience – although I’ve seen a map of the US states lots of times, I’d never looked at it properly.
Most of the states I saw are on the east coast, and that makes sense – we were driving in the northeast. I’d never realised how much denser the states are in the east versus the west – they really are packed in tight. Maybe this is because European colonists arrived on the east coast, and so those areas were more densely populated when the state lines were drawn?
California (far left) is a notable outlier, and I was surprised by just how many cars I saw with those plates – by the end of the trip, I could spot the red faux-handwriting quite easily. Google tells me that California has the most people of any state, which might explain why I saw so many of their cars despite being on the opposite coast.
Washington (top left) is another outlier, and I wonder if I made a mistake here – I know I saw a plate labelled “Washington”, but it turns out Washington DC has its own license plates. Since DC is on the east coast, it’s much more likely I saw a car from there than from a state on far side of the country. Unfortunately I don’t remember what the plate looked like, so I can’t be sure.
While I was in the US, I assumed it was just states who got to issue license plates. Now I know that’s wrong, I wonder if there are other exceptions. Are there any other federal districts or smaller-than-state entities who get to issue their own license plates, or is Washington DC special?
I’ve left Alaska and Hawaii off the map because I didn’t see any of their plates. It’s a long way to drive a car from Alaska, and it’s an expensive job to ship a car from Hawaii – those cars must be pretty rare in the contiguous US.
Drawing this single map has probably helped me internalise more about US geography than anything else. For the first time I’m an active participant in the map – I’m drawing my own data and looking for patterns and causes, not just passively observing data drawn by somebody else.
This is only scratching the surface of the complexity of license plates. There’s so much more history, and variety, and design, all of which would be fun to research and write about if I had more time – but I have to stop somewhere.
I describe topics like this as “fractally interesting”. However deep you dig, however much you learn, there’s more to uncover.
This is why I love looking for the seemingly insignificant details in which life in foreign places differs from mine – it might seem small at first, but there’s always something interesting to learn.