Time was when there were no strangers on the road.

Then, interstates took us away from meandering, from frequent stops and starts, and from visiting. And then, rises in crime made it no longer safe to pick up hitchhikers.

Another mighty blow to meeting strangers while traveling came when states no longer required license plates on the front bumper, so you couldn’t tell whom you were meeting anymore. An even worse blow to road fellowship is the redesigning of rear tags to downplay county identifications.

Our own travels frequently take us through portions of Georgia, the two Carolinas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. Because there aren’t any entertaining Burma Shave signs anymore, we would like to indulge our old pastime of reading license plates to see if any are from places we know. Since there are no front bumper plates anymore, we have to read the ones of the rear bumpers just ahead of us, or those of the many cars and trucks which pass us. (We stay within the speed limits, even if 75 percent of the other motorists do not).

To our utter dismay, license plates have been redesigned in almost every state. Most of them are brightly tri-colored, and several have identifying logos, but unfortunately it’s nigh impossible to identify the origins of the vehicles.

Once upon a time we could strike up instant conversations with complete strangers at rest stops and restaurants simply by spotting a “Boyle” (Danville) or “Marshall” (Benton) in bold print upon a Kentucky plate or a “2” (Memphis) or a “30” (Paris) prefix numeral on a Tennessee plate or a “3” (Montgomery) or “63” (Tuscaloosa) on an Alabama plate.

Home-county recognition made it easy to prime vocal pumps of fellow sojourners. Number codes or plain old block letters for counties were the key to quick friendships — especially in the South where all of us are cousins sooner or later, given enough chatting time to trace family trees.

But now the county prefix numbers are gone from Tennessee — following the extinct but distinctive state-shaped plate of many years ago and of the parallelogram box that succeeded it. Alas!

And “alas!” again, for the Kentucky county names once visible half a mile back have been reduced to Tom Thumb proportions legible only to the most daring of kamikaze tailgaters.

We can live with pretty colors and pictures on the plates, I guess, although I question their usefulness. With palmettos located only near the beach in South Carolina and sea oats only near the beach in North Carolina, do western Carolinians feel inferior or overlooked by such scenes on the plates?

And in Kentucky, where 50 years ago some colleges turned down gifts from racetracks as “dirty money”, does anyone today feel strongly about being compelled to use a plate with horses and stables pictured? Is a cardinal on a Kentucky plate a state bird, or is it a show of support for the University of Louisville over the UK Wildcats? And some of the plates lately have even made political or religious statements which seem inappropriate.

Of course, some athletic enthusiasts cover up the plate pictures with decals of red gamecocks, blue wildcats, and orange tiger paws, even if that may be illegal. Another way around it is to buy a personalized plate with some cute phrase, like my dentist’s ICUB4DK. (I met a man with “PICK-UP” on his old truck who turned it in because it meant something else when his wife drove.)

So now we can tell fairly easily what state the plate promotes, and we can, at the other extreme, personalize the plate to fit our individuality. But what is getting lost — or reduced to print too tiny to read without causing a wreck — is that “in-between” area — the counties.

And that may be intentional. I hear a lot of serious talk about how inefficient it is to have bunches of small counties, and how much more could be done by merging counties. City and county governments are already merging, and county mergers cannot be far behind. A few years without county i. d. on the license plates will set the stage for that revolutionary act.

It figures. Just when all the little high schools in each county have consolidated into one super County High, we start doing away with counties. What’s the use of winning the state basketball or football championship if you can’t identify counties on license plates?