Collecting Ontario licence plates for 40 years
THE
BACK
BUMPER
1930 ONTARIO PLATE ALLOCATION
Click here to skip to the allocation data table below.
All-numeric plates numbered 1-500 were reserved for Members of Provincial Parliament.
Ontario passenger plates started with either one or two letters from 1930 to 1936, and contained one to four trailing numerals, up to a maximum of five characters. Ontario omitted the letters G, I and Q in 1930. The reserved single-letter, D-prefix series for doctors had apparently not yet started by 1930, as these plates are simply included in the Toronto distribution. It is possible that they could have been issued out of Toronto directly to medical doctors as a courtesy, but there is no proof of this.
The Ontario Motor League Manual lists the serial numbers in a different order from what I believe to be the actual issuance. The OML Manual starts with single-letter prefixes, and then goes immediately to the double-letter prefixes of the same letter.
A1 to A9999
AA1 to AZ999
B1 to B9999
BA1 to BZ999 ...
However, the city of Toronto was consistently assigned plates with a single letter prefix only. As Toronto was issued several runs of these single-letter prefixes, other major cities like Hamilton, Ottawa and London also received single letter prefixes. Generally, the smaller centres received plates with a two-letter prefix. Given that the two-letter prefixes only progress partway through the alphabet before ending at the PP series, it is likely that the order of issuance is as follows:
A1 to A9999
B1 to B9999
C1 to C9999 ... continuing through
Y1 to Y9999
Z1 to Z9999
AA1 to AZ999
BA1 to BZ999 ... etc.
Based on this pattern, the highest number issued would have been PP-200 in Tillsonburg. No two-letter prefixes were issued beyond this point, and there are no such prefixes mentioned in the OML list. I have included non-produced dual-prefix ranges in the table below, in order to make it clearer as to which sequences were issued, and which were not.
You can view the table in the original OML manual order, or switch to my hypothesized order of single-letter prefixes issued first, followed by double-letter prefixes. Just click the headings "OML Order" and "Issue Order" to rearrange the table. You can also put the cities in alphabetical order, if you like. Any order can be reversed by clicking a heading a second time.