Reply to post: Re: good grief

0ops. 1,OOO-plus parking fine refunds ordered after drivers typed 'O' instead of '0'

Kobus Botes
Boffin

Re: good grief

And in South Africa it is a mixed bag.

The first number plates had the following format:

Two or three letters followed by numbers (six if it had two letters, else 5). The first letter designated the province, whilst all the letters indicated the origin/town/municipality. Each province had their own scheme of how letters were allocated to places. The Cape Province used population (which makes it quite interesting to see how growth has differed over the years). So Cape Town was CA (still is, but they have stopped recycling old/deregistered numbers, so added CAA, but then ran into trouble when the 99999 numbers were inexplicably used up in less than two years, so they now are contemplating to go to incognito numbers like most of the other provinces now use), Port Elizabeth was CB and so on.

Natal used the town or municipality name. Durban therefore is ND, Pietermaritzburg became NP, Ixopo became NIX, et cetera. The Transvaal and the Orange Free State had their own schemes. I know that the person who set up the rules for the OFS was very unhappy when Sasolburg was proclaimed (it was built specifically to service the coal to oil refinery that was erected in the mid fifties) and someone with a sense of humour designated OIL as the place designator. It stayed OIL.

Somewhere in the seventies the Transvaal had run out of letters and numbers, so they changed the whole province to a computer-generated number that had the format of BBB 000 T (where T indicated Transvaal). No vowels were allowed and Q was also disqualified.

After independence in 1994 and with the four provinces now reorganised into nine, the whole thing changed again. The Western Cape and Natal elected to continue with their old system, whilst the other provinces went with the system that the Transvaal had used. Gauteng therefore became BBB 000 GP, North West BBB 000 NW, and so on.

Gauteng ran out of their 8 million numbers two or three years ago, so they changed to a new format, BB 00 BB GP, which gives them 8 million extra (all old numbers had to change to the new format at the next renewal due).

When personal numbers were allowed the Western Cape went with a WP suffix and Natal with NZ (for KwaZulu/Natal, wich is its new name post 1994). Any combination is allowed, as long as it is not obviously rude. Some rude ones therefore slipped through, as the officials in charge of approval do not necessarily know how to read it. The worst one I saw (on an Audi A4), and the way he drove, made me decide that if ever I was looking for a job and he happened to be an executive at that company, I would not accept it. His number was A4Q2 - WP. (It is of course entirely possible that his second car was an Audi Q2 with Q2A4 - WP, but I would take it as his defence should he be called out on it. It cannot have not been deliberate).

I rather prefer knowing where the car comes from. When I grew up in the sixties, it was customary to flash your headlights at someone from your hometown, if you were travelling far away from home.

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