In 10 months, those little square registration stickers you place in the corner of your vehicle's license plate will become obsolete.

The final sticker will be issued Dec. 30 of this year.That's because of Act 89, signed into law in November 2013.It puts an end to an annual annoyance that was costing the state, meaning taxpayers, more than $3.1 million a year in producing the stickers and mailing them, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.Customers will still need to have their vehicles registered and inspected. But there will no longer be a need to display a registration sticker after the final day of this year.Those tiny registration stickers were intended to show that a plate carried a current registration.But they were impractical and unreliable.For one, the stickers were easily removed by thieves and placed on dead plates. There were reports of stickers being counterfeited and even sold on a black market.For another, the stickers seemed to be too thin and fragile. In fact, the glue on the reverse side seemed stronger than the sticker itself. What this meant is that if you happened to get the glue on your fingers, it was impossible to handle the sticker, which then tore apart very easily.Even the spray of a carwash hose was enough to rip the stickers apart.The stickers were never a foolproof method of proving registration.Under the new system, law enforcement will have in their arsenal an Automated License Plate Reader to provide a better tool to verify expired vehicle registrations.The plate reader will allow police to accurately and reliably check the status of license plates by real-time access to PennDOT's registration database.This will allow officers to determine if a registration has expired and even to check for lack of insurance.There are other innovations being introduced, too.Vehicle owners will be able to pay their registration fee online from home or a mobile device. Actually, 40 percent are already doing it, according to PennDOT. Those folks will be able to print and sign a permanent registration credential.The printed cards remain important.You'll still need to furnish a valid, current registration card at safety inspections.Plans include allowing customers to upload their registration cards to their smartphones and eliminate the requirement to print a copy altogether. But that step is somewhere down the road.The elimination of the registration sticker was evaluated as part of a Penn State University research study that concluded eliminating the registration sticker would have no impact on compliance with vehicle registration laws.A copy of the study is on the Driver and Vehicle Services website at

www.dmv.pa.gov at the Registration Stickers tab under Vehicle Registration.By Donald R. Serfass |

dserfass@tnonline.com