(WHTM)– Pennsylvania drivers with the new license plates celebrating America’s 250th birthday are running into a big problem.
The lucky number in Chinese culture is eight, but it’s the unlucky number for some drivers in Pennsylvania right now. The new plates now display the number “0” with a slash through it. While it may be easy for the human eye to distinguish between zero and eight, technologies are having difficulty.
License plate-reading equipment hasn’t been effectively distinguishing between vehicles to avoid sending toll violation notices to the wrong people.
The idea behind the changes to the number zero was to help distinguish it from the letter “O,” but sometimes solving one problem creates another.
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PennDOT said it worked with the State Police and the PA Turnpike to develop the new plates and address the past problem of differentiating between zeros and “O.” PennDOT said it knows some license readers are now having trouble with eights and zeros.
However, the problem should ease as readers read more plates and “learn” the difference, according to PennDOT.
One man didn’t want to wait for that. He took his plate back to a local tag agency to ask for a different one after getting tickets he shouldn’t have gotten.
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