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Is why you don't have the letter "O" in UK number plates.

The fines are not the issue, but the idiots that came up with the number plate scheme.

It's unusual, but not unheard of. I had a car with S401 ONH on the plate - and not by special request, it was an ex-rental vehicle.

Presumably the reverse, where an Inspector confused 0's and O's, was grounds for appeal?

If only there was a way of printing a receipt for a payment, that could be attached to the car as proof of payment.

We do. in the 1980s, my mum's Ford Fiesta was GOO 522 Y. My current car has the last 3 letters HFO.

In the TV programme "That's Life", viewers sent in their unusual photos or odd-shaped vegetables etc.

I remember one photo they showed that had two cars parked next to each other. The registration plates were:

YOU ... .

COW ... .

I'm going to have to disagree with you there.

My current car has the letter "O" in it's registration, and a previous car had 2 letter "O"s in the registration.

In the UK and Aus case though, the number plates are deterministic. You know which are letters, and which are numbers. Perhaps the ticket machines didn't have a QWERTY keyboard, and were confusing to use.

Correction - it's possible to know which are letters and which are numbers. Not everyone does, and why should they be expected to?

I've seen plenty of UK number plates like OOO7 ABC - the first two are O's, the third is a zero. I know this because I happen to understand the format, but it would be unreasonable to expect everyone to do so, and to base parking enforcement fines on this, particularly when the UK number plate font has identical characters for O and zero, and for I and one.

It's certainly reasonable to expect an ANPR robot, or a parking enforcement officer, to understand the difference even if the owner of the plate doesn't. (I just sold a car with 03OU as the first digits.)

Bloody hell, MISRA compliance checkers know the difference when looking at variable names and sulk if they see one where it can be misread by a fleshy meatsack.

If it's a known format, the users entry can be rejected or corrected automatically.

For example AA11AAA is a valid modern number plate. AAIIAAA is not.

( Come to think of it, my last car but two had two "O" characters in it and one 0, in the format AA01 OAO).

it was AAA 000A when I was a kid, the last letter was the year. When they got to Y (because Z looks too much like 2?) it became A000 AAA with the first letter indicating the year. When they reached the end of the alphabet again it became AA00 AAA with 00 indicating the year, 00 for the first half of 2000 and 50 for the second.

It's not tricky to work out, it's obvious enough in most cases. Is it weird that I know that from looking at number plates and not from having it explained to me?

QWERTY keyboard

I believe some UK machines don't have a QWERTY keyboard - it can be a real pain if you're used to typing with one

https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/96260/uk-car-number-plates-explained-rules-history-and-what-they-mean

States that O isn't used, but Wikipedia says that O is used for Oxford area. There was a change around 2001. Five minutes of digging hasn't brpught up anything definitive - perhaps you guys can do better.

Ultimately, the whole damned point of a licence plate is that someone can report that a "red car, TF20 something something possibly a P" has just sped off after running over their dog - and understandably they won't have the best view of the plate or the best state of mind to remember it. The first part of the plate is the area code on the grounds that witnesses are more likely to read it, and knowing the area makes searching for 'red car's easier - especially in the days when different areas had different databases.

They certainly can contain the letter "O", and I've had two cars with it. The only letters excluded are I and Q.

It is logical to exclude any IQ from a numbering scheme...

Q plates do exist. They are issued when they don't know the age of the vehicle. It is pretty difficult to get insurance for them.

Or for kit or bitsa cars.

I (the letter) is used in UK plates in N Ireland. When GIL numbers were issued they became very popular in the rest of the UK as personalised plates.

The UK has simple number plate formats. Any parking app should be able to correct 0/O errors because the number plate format dictates where the numbers and letters go, except some esoteric ancient and custom formats. But in the main, yes, certain letters are excluded from numberplates because of the risk of confusion.

(TBH RingGo does a DVLA lookup of your car when you enter the numberplate, to get a confirmation from you that all is correct, which would negate the possibility of this issue entirely)

Yes we do have O in number plates. O and 0 look exactly the same, as does I and 1. The only way to know which it is is to know the position of the character on the plate. They can be:

LL00 LLL (the most recent form, for plates issued since Sept 2001)

L000 LLL (from 1983 to 2001) - the number portion never has a leading 0, and can have fewer than 3 digits

LLL 000L (from 1963 to 1983) - the number portion never has a leading 0, and can have fewer than 3 digits

When it comes to custom number plates, do the DVLA still sell plates which could possibly be confuse?

(eg OO7 and 007?)

Or BO07 - for a plate issued in Birmingham between April - September 2007 ...

It is plainly absurd to have a number plate format where there can be any ambiguity between letters and numbers. How would that work? e.g. would they send the speed camera fine to 1YO0I2 when it was IY0O12 that was photographed?

That being the case, there really isn't any excuse for the council to issue fines to people who put an 0 instead of an O.

Yes we do

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/vehicle-registration-numbers-and-number-plates

My last car’s number started OE60, nothing unusual in that. The O and the 0 looked identical too.

In the past, companies enforcing parking on private land in the UK would invoice people for payment when they entered the wrong registration, confusing O with 0. More recently, the British Parking Association has been embarrassed into updating its "code of practice" to tell its members to "let off" people who make this mistake.

"More recently, the British Parking Association has been embarrassed into updating its "code of practice" to tell its members to "let off" people who make this mistake"

Specifically, "reduce the charge to £20" (according to the BPA man who was on You & Yours earlier this week). :( Really, there's no excuse (from a design perspective*) for not looking up the plate against a database ...

* as in desigining something good, not designed to make as much money as possible

Any plate issued in Oxfordshire in mid-2010 would look like that. The second letter will vary depending on whereabouts in Oxfordshire it was issued.

Exactly. It's a problem that was clearly foreseen - and averted - by the designers of the UK number plate system.

Also worthy of respect: the husband and wife team who design the font for UK highways. Birmingham is more immediately readable than BIRMINGHAM (as it would be in Alabama).

My current plate is EO08, presumably it used to belong to James Bonds collegue. The scrapes down the side certain point to that being the case.

Given that both are valid (Which is stupid in the first place), then how hard can it be to test for both combinations before issuing a fine.

The other option is to make the symbols look more difficult, a diagonal line through a zero is how the rest of the world fixed the same problem

Are there any other conflicting symbols - such as 1, I, L, etc.

Two things follow from the registration number formatting rules.

1. Entering O instead of 0 cause an easily detectable invalid number. This could be immediately reported by either the app or the front-end system and the sale refused.

2. It's also therefore trivial to self-correct the data entry.

Since neither of these were done, the parking authority took money for an invalid sale. This is fraud.

The lawyers for the drivers did an extremely bad job in only getting a refund. They should have got a prosecution for fraud for the mis-sale of parking permission, and embezzlement for proceding to a fine.

If I paid to park OO7 and got fined for parking 007 what happened to the money paid for a car that was never in the car park?

Yes, it's funny isn't it that these errors only ever work in the authority's favour.

"So sorry - you paid a fee for a vehicle that never actually used the facility, so here's your refund"... yeah, right, never going to happen.

Yes. I made a mistake typing my car reg no. at the Dartford crossing.(Used some letters from a car I had a few months previously)

Got the letter, phoned and they said the penalty stood, but I could just pay the fee. It's only about £3.

However they don't credit my card with the £3 that went against a non-existant vehicle number, though I had the email confirmation it had been paid.

Two issues, then.

1) I had a confirmation that a fee had been paid at the correct time for a reg number that was mostly correct for mine, but they can't just reconcile the fee paid to the reg number that did cross at that time when requested to. A pretty trivial bit of work.

2) They did not refund a fee paid for a crossing that was not made (by the reg number).

MAC addresses! No Os in there, only zeros! I hate serial numbers with the dreaded "O"

No Os in MAC addresses... but there are Bs and 8s

Pierce Brosnan wouldn't have had a problem, cos the 'meter maid' wouldn't have been able to even see his Aston Martin!

it will go against a bar tab for Martinis (shaken, not stirred)

The number plate fonts worldwide are mostly badly designed. The best one I have seen is the Dutch system where it is hard to get wrong.

The uk font, well from a distance O and 0, and I and 1 are the same due to the 1 not having serifs far too many people stick a pair of 1s close together and add a suitable fixing hole with a black cap, the same as a 8 with a white cap in the centre.

But then it comes down to the issuers being sensible and blocks say I and O from the letters to make it easier to read.

The UK font has them identical when close up, not just at a distance.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/vehicle-registration-numbers-and-number-plates

i ("eye") is not used.

I suppose you could sort that with a QR code in addition to human readable, so copper's ANPR doesn't get confused either, no matter how creative the screw placement

Despite the .gov.uk source it's GB-only. NI uses I. I once had EOI as the letters.

Smooth move creating license plates' using a typeface doesn't have an easily recognized difference between the two characters.

If I'm handing off handwritten information to someone, I'll slash my zeroes if there's any chance of the reader having to distinguish between an "O" and a zero. (Also, sevens to avoid anyone thinking I was trying to write a "1". If you've seen my handwriting...)

In a former life, one of our Oracle data warehouses used multiple mount points for tablespaces: /u01a, /u01b, etc. Once the database began growing by leaps and bounds, the DBAs and I made the decision that we would //not// use "l" or "o" as suffixes for mount points. We just //knew// that using either of those would create headaches at some point.

Here in the Philippines.

I O and Q are all valid. Number 0 has a small gap in it.

New cars here are using dealer plates for years after purchase because the Govt contract with a dutch firm was cancelled due to (suspected) corruption. Govt set up a plate manufacturing factory, but is taking long time to catch up.

No NPR here so it don't really matter.

Innocently? Mistyped? Typing O instead of 0, and vice versa?

Hmmm... I know my reg and I can operate a keyboard (even a touchscreen). So why did so many drivers get it wrong?

It's almost like they did it on purpose...

Hmmm... I know my reg and I can operate a keyboard (even a touchscreen).

And you probably aren't late for that appointment, have poor eyesight, dyslexia or a couple of screaming kids at your feet distracting you either.

You're missing the point. They didn't mistype to avoid paying, they mistyped WHILE paying. So they paid the parking fee, but also got a fine for not paying for THAT car reg.

The 0 / O confusion is less hellish than the 1 (numeric) / I (Upper-case letter i) / l (Lower-case letter L) mess which bedevils most fonts. Trying to figure this out for system-assigned User IDs and Booking References etc. is a constant nightmare when you can't copy/paste.

Generally you won't find me saying much nice about Bitcoin, but their decision to use base-58 encoding was brilliant. No digit 0 or upper case O, no digit 1 or lower case l.