Lawmaker pushes bill to put license plates on front of motorcycles

Rep. Jo In-cheol of the Democratic Party of Korea, who represents Gwangju's Seo-gu Gap district and sits on the Land and Transportation Committee, said Monday he had introduced a bill to amend the Motor Vehicle Management Act. The bill would require motorcycles to carry front license plates while delegating the specifics — including which vehicles must comply, where plates must be placed and how they must be attached — to presidential decree based on each vehicle's purpose, structure and safety characteristics.

Motorcycle fatalities currently run at three times the rate of passenger cars, yet the introduction of front plates has stalled at the discussion stage over safety concerns. With the government still studying the idea through pilot projects and commissioned research, attention is turning to whether the bill can clear a full plenary vote.

Under current law, Jo said, motorcycles are only required to display a license plate at the rear in a clearly visible location. That restriction has drawn repeated criticism because front-facing automated enforcement cameras — used to catch signal violations and speeding — cannot identify motorcycles or issue citations when only a rear plate exists.

The gap in enforcement is directly linked to the high fatality rate. According to the Road Traffic Authority's Traffic Accident Analysis System, motorcycles were involved in 14,129 traffic accidents in 2025, killing 388 people — a rate of 2.75 deaths per 100 accidents. That is about 2.1 times the overall traffic accident average of 1.31 deaths per 100 accidents and about 3.1 times the passenger-car rate of 0.90.

Motorcycles account for 7.3 percent of all traffic accidents but 15.2 percent of all traffic fatalities.

Public frustration with motorcycle traffic violations has also been mounting. Data submitted to Jo's office by the Korea Transportation Safety Authority show that tip-offs about illegal motorcycle behavior filed through the public traffic-safety reporting system totaled about 1.13 million cases between 2020 and 2025. Annual reports surged from 51,826 in 2020 to 196,316 in 2021 and have since held steady at roughly 230,000 to 270,000 cases a year through 2024.

The government has already begun working on regulatory reform. Improving motorcycle license plates — including the introduction of front plates — was a campaign pledge of President Lee Jae-myung. Other countries have adopted front-identification systems: Singapore requires all vehicles to display their registration numbers on both front and rear plates, while India allows front registration plates on motorcycles to be mounted parallel to the handlebars on a mudguard or a separate panel.

The push to introduce front plates has long been slowed by safety concerns, chiefly that a conventional metal plate could injure pedestrians in a collision.

The bill centers on expanding the required plate-mounting location from the rear only to both the front and rear. Rather than imposing a uniform standard, however, it would leave the details — which vehicles must comply, where plates go and how they are attached — to presidential decree, to be set after weighing each motorcycle's purpose, front-end structure, riding safety and the need for traffic-law enforcement.

The bill also places an obligation on motorcycle manufacturers, assemblers and importers to install the hardware needed to mount a front plate. The rationale is that a front-plate regime can only work in practice if vehicles are built or imported with a front-plate-ready structure from the outset, not merely required to carry one once on the road.

"If we leave in place a system where a plate only at the rear lets motorcycles slip through front-facing enforcement cameras, there will always be a limit to how much we can reduce reckless driving and signal violations," Jo said. "Introducing front license plates for motorcycles is not about increasing punishment — it is the minimum safety measure needed to create a traffic order where both pedestrians and drivers can feel secure."

He added that because the government is already running pilot projects and commissioned research, the National Assembly should proactively establish the legal framework to close the gap before the system is ready to launch. "I will do everything I can to pass this legislation so that a front-plate regime that actually works in the field — one that fully accounts for the purpose, structure and safety of motorcycles — can take root," he said.