ACT plates start with Y?

[cabdude]

I’ve noticed that all car licence plates that I’ve seen from the ACT, Australia, start with a letter Y. I’ve never seen any that don’t. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any, it just means I’ve never seen any. Can any Canberrans confirm that all the plates start with Y and Y this should be so?

[Colophon]

I’m not from there, but I was bored, and I Googled, and I found [www.mix106.com.au/listings1.asp+car+registration+plates+ACT+canberra&hl=en]Mark](http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:YEAtjE6HzuEJ:[url) & Kylie from MIX 106.3FM. Apparently, they do, and this is why:

ages ago when registration plates were changed from numbers to both letters and numbers – they (don’t know who) started letter allocation from the end of the alphabet! Z was allocated to the Commonwealth, X had gone for some reason, so Canberra got lumbered with the letter Y!

Hmm.

[Colophon]

Hmm, let’s try that again.

Linky.

[NSWBlues]

We actually ran out of starting-with-Y combinations in the 3-letter, 3-number format.
So letters now appear in the numbers bit.

I’ve also noticed NSW plates are reusing our old Y combos.

[Lord_Mondegreen]

@NSWBlues

We actually ran out of starting-with-Y combinations in the 3-letter, 3-number format.
So letters now appear in the numbers bit.

I’ve also noticed NSW plates are reusing our old Y combos.

The current format of ACT plates is three letters, two numbers and a letter. The first letter is still always a “Y.” The other day I saw “YBC 00L,” which I read as “Why be cool.”

Of course, there are personalised plates which don’t follow this convention.

[Cunctator]

When I lived in Canberra I was told that the ubiquitous Y ACT licence plates had something to do with the city’s layout i.e. a reference either to the parliamentary triangle, or to the three major centres of Canberra (Civic, Belconnen and Tuggeranong). Personally, this explanation sounds like a load of rubbish invented after the event to explain a purely bureaucratic decision (as described by Colophon).

[NSWBlues]

@Lord Mondegreen

The current format of ACT plates is three letters, two numbers and a letter.

Yeah, that’d be why I already said that.

[Bytegeist]

Z was allocated to the Commonwealth, X had gone for some reason, so Canberra got lumbered with the letter Y!

Does this imply that Australian plates are unique across the entire country, with the initial letter encoding the city or district?

(This isn’t the case in the US, where a given plate will be unique within its state, but not unique (in general) across the country.)

[Giles]

@Bytegeist

Does this imply that Australian plates are unique across the entire country, with the initial letter encoding the city or district?

(This isn’t the case in the US, where a given plate will be unique within its state, but not unique (in general) across the country.)

I think that used to be the case, but that they have now run out of the letter-number combinations available to do this.

However, generally you can tell which state issued the plate by the colour combination (though some states have used several cominations – New South Wales has used white letters on black, and black letters on yellow, and now uses black letters on white). So I suspect that these days you could identify a plate uniquely across Australia by the letters, numbers and colours of the plate.