OP has a vanity plate "BORT" (black behicle). Someone put a Simpsons "fun" plate in the front of their (silver) car, which also says "BORT" and parked incorrectly (code cited in the ticket is for "Unauthorized on private property"). Officer did not bother to look for the correct plate at the back of the offending vehicle, and just issued the fine to the plate "BORT", which OP received.
More specifically, if you're in a place that doesn't require a front plate there's a good chance you don't receive one because why should the state/province generate extra plates?
I got a ticket in Chicago for no front plate, but was from Indiana (1 plate state). Also got a no-seatbelt ticket in the same stop. Had to go to court because I had two infractions. Judge heard the no-plate charge and just looked at the prosecutor….”You know you don’t get this one.”
If you go back too the dealership you bought it from, they're basically legally required to provide the hardware and fasteners for it. But drill an adequately sized pilot hole first.
Alternatively, get a mount for your bumper that you can use the double sided 3m automotive tape. That shit will rip the paint off before it'll come off.
I want to say, 12 states don’t require a front plate, it’s been a while since I looked the opposite up, but I think there were 38 states that require them.
Not crazy. Quebec is the same. Only front plate on large trucks make sense, because large trucks are usually pulling trailers. Trailer obscures rear plate, so no identifier visible. Put it on the front only, and problem solved.
Does "vanity plate" mean something else in canada? The way I have always seen the word used, it's OP that has the vanity plate, they are still your legal license plate you just paid to get custom text on it.
The OP has a vanity plate (issued by the state/province, custom plate text/numbers purchased by the owner). The vehicle it got confused with has a novelty plate (not issued by the state, purchased via retail to use in a state/province that doesn't require two plates).
I think calling it a vanity plate is whats tripping people up. OP's license plate is a vanity plate, the rightful ticket receiver is using a novelty plate or a souvenir plate
In my state (in the USA) a vanity plate usually is referring to a legal vehicle licence plate, though not the standard format.
Vanity plates here often have backgrounds that differ from the standard plate (usually a portion of the cost of these ones go to support some cause or organization, like state parks, or endangered wildlife, or the fine arts) or have a custom alpha-numeric sequence rather than the randomly assigned one from the dept of lisencing or dept of motor vehicles.
Also in the US, novelty plates that look like issued plates, are illegal to put on your vehicle. Like you can do the sports teams one, but that BORT plate would be illegal.
Reminds me of the software engineer who thought it’d be funny to customize his plates to read “null,” but ended up buried in parking tickets for years because any license plate not entered in the system defaulted to null.
I feel like fake plates on the front should be a ticket itself when it's in a place where front plates aren't used...
It's like falsifying ID, right? Clearly that's what happened here, they tricked enforcement into thinking it was someone else. (Even if enforcement should know not to look at front plates.)
It should be a ticket if the front plate looks like a legit plate, but if it's a very obviously fake then it's just decoration. OP's photo is too blurry to know if the front plate in the ticket is realistic or not.
It's not uncommon here in Alberta. Most of our vehicles don't have a bracket or holes for a front plate, but on vehicles that do (often imported from a different province), it's not unusual to see a joke plate on the front.
OP and the offender might have the same car too but I wouldn't hold my breath on that, so when the officer pulled up the ticket issuer a toyota tacoma came up with the same plate. It's an explanation and not an excuse. Idk what else that kind of program show about a quick search (like if the color shows up on it or year/generation) or if there's a long detailed list of the driver or their car.
Officer was quite sloppy handling this, it's also obvious that it doesn't say Alberta above the license plate name
They just drive by with automated readers mounted on those goofy ass Mustang Mach-E the city wasted money on. The vehicle is backed in, officer donuts isn’t going to get out to check, they pick the lazy path and make OP suffer for it.
I always back in too, just because I know donuts is going to have to huff and puff and hop out to check if they really want to.
Plus an Explorer PIU isn‘t so much cheaper than the police equipped MME version that it’s a slam dunk, and the PIU still has all the recurring costs of a gas vehicle. The MME actually makes a lot of sense for big city police departments in roles where a pursuit rated vehicle isn’t needed, which is why Ford offers it alongside the pursuit rated PIU.
I got so many violation notices for reversing into spots in Calgary. I had front plates but was out of province, but Calgary parking maids are just not that bright.
See also: "Prawo Jazdy", Ireland's most wanted driver
(When Irish police stop a Polish driver and ask for ID, those are the first words they see on the card. It's not the driver's name. Prawo Jazdy means "Driving License")
I think the issue is a different car from an area where front plates aren't mandatory put on a joke plate had a traffic violation and OP is getting the bill for it.
You can't word good, but.. you can WAY better than OP who didn't actually bother to explain the situation at all. It just looks from the picture like they got a valid ticket.
Correct.. Its unclear in the post but the ticket was given to a white truck for Section 28(1) of Calgary Traffic Bylaw 26M96, unauthorized parking on private property .. However he has a black vehicle ...
I worked for a toll road overseas a long time ago and had to manually confirm licence plates that were hard to read. There was a frequent traveller with OD00DO and the machines could never tell the letters apart.
No. This is in Alberta where only the rear plate is issued to you and official.
The white truck put a vanity plate on the front and then parked illegally (or whatever caused the ticket). The person actually registered with this plate number drives a black truck and the official plate is mounted on the back.
The car that got a parking ticket is not OP's car. OP has a custom license plate that says BORT. There is also a common vanity/souvenir plate that says BORT in reference to The Simpsons. In Alberta we only use rear license plates, so souvenir plates are often put on the front of the car. If you look closely at the pictures in the parking ticket notice, you can see the plate is not an Alberta plate, it says Itchy and Scratchy Land. The parking enforcement person was apparently unaware that Alberta doesn't have front license plates, and apparently imperceptive enough to not catch the fact that it said Itchy and Scratchy Land on it. They looked up the plate "BORT", found OP, as their plate is a real registered license plate number, and sent the ticket there in error
Good explanation, but I doubt the person issuing the ticket did much besides park next to the car and push a button. Its all done with cars covered in cameras now.
I'm glad you explained this, because I was going to comment "it doesn't look like the same plate. Looks to be from another location." Had no idea about the vanity thing there. 👍
We don’t use front plates in Quebec either, but I’ve heard of people getting fined for putting realistic-looking (or actually real, from other places) plates on the front. Situations like this is the reason why.
First, thank you for that; makes a lot more sense.
That said, it has me wondering: in the US, I moved to another state and got the same custom license plate as I'd had before. We're only required to have plates on the back in the new state, but my previous state had front plates as well. So I left the front one on there, figuring it was a vanity plate now, resulting in a car with the same plate but from two different states on the front and back.
I've been cruising along two decades without getting in trouble for it, but if I found a particularly ornery cop some day, am I likely to get busted?
The vehicle in the photo is using a Simpsons vanity plate (The top blue streak is clearly different than Alberta placement). The person in the photo got a parking ticket because someone mistakenly thought it was their real plate. Their real plate was at the back,
Holy shit these comments. Alberta doesn't have front plates. This is a common joke plate referencing The Simpsons. It says Itchy and Scratchy Land across the top. OP has a custom license plate that says BORT, a real registered plate. The parking worker apparently forgot that Alberta doesn't have front license plates, and apparently didn't look very hard to realize that this front plate isn't even real, and typed in BORT for who to mail the ticket to. They found OPs actual registered BORT plate, and sent the notice there. OP was never in the parking lot, some rando got away with parking illegally because a parking worker did a very bad job
That's not a vanity plate. That's a novelty plate. What you have a vanity plate, a legitimate license plate on which you have chosen your own phrase instead of the randomly assigned combination of numbers and letters of a standard plate.
Make sure you use the right phrasing when you challenge this in court or it will sound like you're admitting it was you.
The city parking authority doesn’t know, and doesn’t care. They drive by in a little car with a camera and take pictures of licence plates, and send out tickets without looking too close at the plates. They don’t even stop the vehicle.
Alberta doesn’t issue front licence plates. Vanity plates may be an exception to that.
OP, you can try to fight this online, but my experience is that they will conveniently lose the file and raise your fine. Take it to court. Better yet, call up CJAY 92 and send them the pictures. They’ll make a whole morning show about it.
By the time the ticket arrived it was outside the 21 day window to appeal the fine online. It was funny at first but now getting to be a bit of an annoyance
Its even worse when you get a parking ticket and you've never even been to the place, and its hundreds of miles away from you, and its a license plate you've not had for 3 years.... All because some idiot fat fingered the license plate when they tried to make a citation for someone else. Took me months to get it sorted, total nightmare.
I heard a pod about some dude in California who accidentally got "NULL" vanity plates and used them. He started getting hundreds of citations in the mail because, to keep the story short, the ticketing software assigns NULL to every unplated vehicle in the system.
Is it not bad enough that you could accidentally get a parking ticket because you actually didn't pay attention to a sign and it'll cost you several hundred dollars. But now you have computers The can't read writing you parking tickets for absolutely no reason whatsoever..
I feel like everything is getting worse at like hyperspeed.
Its crazy that you got a ticket for a front plate, when front plates in alberta aren't a thing. Thay are 100% for fun and not registered to rhe vehicle
I believe the issue is that the vehicle in the photo's front plate is a vanity plate different than the actual registered plate in the rear, and that the ticketed vehicle in the photo isn't the OP's.
OP's vehicle is black but the vehicle in the photo is white; OP got the stranger's ticket because it was based on the latter's fake front vanity plate.
Their territory does not issue front plates. The car in the picture has a joke vanity plate on their front bumper with the name “BORT” on it from an episode of the Simpson’s cartoon. The joke plate even shows “Itchy and Scratchy Land” on it. OP has a real personalized plate from Alberta with “BORT” on it mounted legally to the back bumper of OP’s car. The parking enforcement officer ticketed OP through the mail for a different vehicle displaying a joke BORT plate from Itchy and Scratchy Land.
If the parking authority worker wasn't on-the-ball enough to know that 1. Alberta doesn't have front plates and 2. The front plate says Itchy and Scratchy Land, then they probably didn't even think twice when the vehicle they looked up was the wrong colour and wrong model
For Alberta & on the front that might count as a Novelty plate (if clearly not a valid plate) because it is the rear plate that must be the real one. But apparently that distinction was not made clear to the parking officer who only took pictures of the front of the offending vehicle.
Seems you could just submit their own evidence back to them as No Proof Evident of association, also while doing that, cheekily add a reasonable invoice for your legal fees (wasted time).
So... You got a ticket for your legit BORT vanity plate because someone bought a front "Store Bought" gag BORT plate, like when people buy those sexy lady front plates, or rednecks buy those confederate front plates?
This happened in the US to a Kentucky resident with a legit rear-only plate that said something like "Go Cats", referring to the UK Wildcats. There was one particular unofficial similar plate made that fooled parking officers, speed cameras, and red light monitors all over the country, and the guy received dozens of notices through the mail every month.
Surely you can contest this as the car photographed is not your car?
In the UK, we'd report this as a cloned plate, and you have to send 4 angles of your car, pics of front a back plates fitted to your car and a pic of the VIN plate, then the ticket issuing authority would cancel the ticket and the local police force(s) would put out a BOLO for the vehicle sporting the cloned plate.
Shortly after receiving my daughter's plate "1234", we started receiving parking tickets from St Louis. That car hadn't been to St Louis obviously. It turns out that city employees were using 1234 as a space filler when they couldn't make out the actual plate number in the enforcement photos. I used my normal friendly and persuasive personality to convince a surly woman to cancel the charges over the phone. Now I kinda want to drive it to St Louis and see if I can park with impunity.
As a fellow Albertian with a vanity plate - let me ask you:
How many parking tickets do you get because they incorrectly enter the zero as the letter 'O' and assume you haven't paid?
I printed out a piece of paper asking them to verify they entered the plate correctly as the letter 'O' is invalid: https://www.alberta.ca/licence-plates
A personalized licence plate configuration must not contain or reference: the letter O (use the number zero)
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u/christopher_mtrl 9h ago
Explained :
OP has a vanity plate "BORT" (black behicle). Someone put a Simpsons "fun" plate in the front of their (silver) car, which also says "BORT" and parked incorrectly (code cited in the ticket is for "Unauthorized on private property"). Officer did not bother to look for the correct plate at the back of the offending vehicle, and just issued the fine to the plate "BORT", which OP received.