Used to be you could cruise down the highway and glance at a passing car and know right away what state it was from.

A plateful

Now you'd be lucky if you could recognize one of your own state's plates.

There are more than 100 different kinds of Montana license plates in use today. That includes 17 different military plates, 20 collegiate, 16 for service organizations and 10 for parks and the environment.

There are also eight plates for wildlife, six for city, county or tribal governments, five for museums or historical groups, five more for youth groups and four for public schools — that is, high school license plates for kids who just learned how to drive.

If your vehicle is more than 30 years old and it's a collector item not used for transportation, you can get either an antique plate or keep the original plate that came with the car way back when.

By far the most popular plates are the Glacier Fund, Lewis and Clark Commission and Gallatin County Open Lands Board.

You'll see a lot of the "open lands" plates here in the Flathead, which frustrates the Glacier Fund folks. After all, the Glacier Fund pioneered the whole business of having specialty plates, and money raised by buying the "open lands" plates benefits folks around Bozeman, not here.

Obviously, plate choice has more to do with aesthetics than good sense. The "open lands" plate is better looking, most people agree. The Glacier Fund plate looks like an aquarium from a distance — only up close can you see a little bit of green amongst all that blue. Missing is the brown of elk, deer, moose and grizzly bears, the white of snow, sheep and goats, and the red of the historic jammer buses.

The folks down in Bozeman are pretty clever with their designs. Another plate I see around the Flathead has cute little paw prints and an even cuter puppy. It's for the Humane Society of Gallatin County.

The Montana Newspaper Association has a plate all its own featuring a paperboy, arm-raised, hawking his trade. To the right is something that looks like the Guttenberg press. You'd think that an industry that does graphics for a living could come up with a popular design.

The Montana Right To Life Association Educational Trust hired the right artists — there're two "smiley faces" in the bottom left-hand corner, but most of the plate is covered with pretty mountains, green trees and blue skies.

Alumni who like to argue the Cats-Griz debate decades after they've graduated might be surprised to learn there are three University of Montana-Missoula plates but only one Montana State University-Bozeman plate. You can get the UM grizzly, UM clock tower or UM grizzly scholarship plate.

Four years ago, Whitefish's former state Sen. Bob DePratu tried to get a handle on all this license plate business. His bill would have revoked a plate if less than 400 of the design were purchased or renewed in the third year after it became available. It also would have raised the sponsor's initial fees from $1,200 to $4,000 if the plate didn't have 400 prepaid applications lined up.

The bill failed, and many of the poorer selling plates are still available — the Algerian Shrine Temple, the Student Assistance Foundation, the Boy Scouts of America, Montana Council and the Girl Scouts of Big Sky Council.

Maybe they should contact those artists in Bozeman and see about getting a new design.