A Colorado driver got a photo-radar ticket from a town two hours away. The car in the citation photo wasn’t even the same vehicle. The culprit was a single character — the letter O misread as the number 0 by an automated license plate reader that apparently nobody thought to question.
Colorado has now stopped issuing plates with the letter O in the fourth position. The state also tweaked its plate font to better differentiate the two characters. Problem solved, according to officials. Except it isn’t.
The real story isn’t about typography. It’s about a state that looked at a technology failure and decided the alphabet was the problem.
Colorado switched to a four-letter, two-number plate format in 2018, placing letters and numbers on the same side. That created situations where O and 0 could occupy similar positions. Automated plate readers — deployed by municipalities, toll operators, parking enforcers, and police — started confusing the two.
The result was a cascade of wrong speeding tickets, bogus toll charges, phantom parking citations, and traffic stops involving drivers who had done nothing wrong.
A 9NEWS investigation traced the confusion squarely to the machines, not to human readers. People can generally tell an O from a zero. The cameras cannot, or at least not reliably enough to avoid dragging innocent drivers into disputes they never should have had to fight.
And yet Colorado’s fix targets the plates. Not the cameras. Not the enforcement pipeline that apparently has no mechanism for flagging uncertain reads before mailing out citations or lighting up a patrol car.
The state says it works with agencies to calibrate their readers, which is the kind of vague assurance that means very little to someone who just spent weeks contesting a toll bill from a road they’ve never driven.
These automated systems don’t just read plates — they trigger enforcement actions. Fines. Stops. Records. The entire chain from camera snap to citation assumes the read is correct.
When it isn’t, the burden of proof shifts to the driver. You have to prove you weren’t there, that your car isn’t the one in the photo, that a machine made a mistake. That’s a backwards presumption baked into a system that was sold as efficient and objective.
Colorado isn’t alone in leaning hard on plate readers. Cities and states across the country have deployed them for tolling, speed enforcement, parking, and surveillance. The technology is fast, cheap, and scalable, but the systems built around it rarely account for its flaws in ways that protect drivers.
Removing the letter O from one plate position is a band-aid on a structural problem. Older plates with O in that spot are still on the road. Other character confusions — D and 0, B and 8, I and 1 — remain unaddressed.
The fundamental question persists: why does any enforcement system act on an uncertain read without human verification?
Colorado had two choices. It could demand that the technology meet a higher standard before generating enforcement actions. Or it could retire a letter. It chose the letter.
That tells you everything about where the power sits in the relationship between automated enforcement and the people it’s supposed to serve.
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