Bucharest Filled Up First

I · The arithmetic on the plate

Ninety-nine digit pairs, fourteen thousand three hundred and sixty-six letter groups

Every Romanian plate follows the same architecture, whatever the county: a fixed one- or two-letter code, then two digits, then a group of three letters. The code was set once, in 1990, alphabetically — AB for Alba, TM for Timiș, B, alone, for Bucharest. What changes, car after car, is the rest: the digits and the letters.

The letters don't come from the full alphabet. Q is missing everywhere, because it's too easily mistaken for O on surveillance cameras and in poor visibility. I and O can't open the three-letter group, for the same reason — the risk of being read as 1 and 0. That leaves twenty-three possible letters for the first position and twenty-five for each of the other two, minus a handful of sequences withheld because they'd read like a state institution: POL, SRI, GUV, DEP, and a few others.

Multiplied out, the two digits and three letters give fourteen thousand three hundred and sixty-six letter combinations for each digit pair, from 01 to 99. The result is a fixed ceiling, the same for any county still on the two-digit format: 1,422,234 possible plates. It doesn't matter how large the county is or how fast its fleet is growing — past that number, the format simply has nothing left to give.

II · The day it ran dry

B-117-VAY, the first three-digit plate

On January 4, 2010, at Bucharest's plate-making workshop, Ionel Vai — the workshop's supervisor — received the first three-digit plate ever issued in Romania: B-117-VAY. It wasn't a symbolic choice, just a practical one: someone had to test the new format before the public did, and the most convenient candidate happened to work right there.

It wasn't a whim. Over 1,200,000 two-digit plates had already been issued in Bucharest, and by the authorities' own count, only about 200,000 free combinations remained — enough for a few more months of registrations, not much longer. The two digits, exhausted down to the last pair, were replaced with three, and the ceiling for a single county code jumped to more than ten times its former size overnight.

Sixteen years on, Bucharest remains the only Romanian county to have ever exhausted the two-digit format.

III · Why the combinations don't come back

A reservoir that empties from the front, not the middle

Combinations aren't handed out at random. DRPCIV, the vehicle registration authority, allocates plates from the general series sequentially, in order of request — the next free combination, not one picked from the middle of the reservoir. A plate left behind by a deregistered car can, in theory, return to the available list, especially if the owner doesn't request to keep the combination for a new car. In practice, though, a reservoir that keeps emptying from the front rarely refills fast enough to keep pace with a fleet adding tens of thousands of cars a year.

That explains a gap that looks odd at first: in 2012, Bucharest's active fleet — the cars actually on the road, not the total plates ever issued — numbered 1,118,125 vehicles, under the 1,422,234 ceiling. The format had already run out two years earlier. The difference is explained by the cars already retired by then: each had permanently used up one combination from the reservoir, even though none of them show up in any count of the active fleet today.

IV · The rest of the country, sixteen years on

No one else has really come close

Of the remaining forty-one counties, none today passes thirty percent of the ceiling Bucharest broke through in 2010. Cluj comes closest, with 426,096 active cars in 2024 — 29.96% of 1,422,234. Timiș follows with 413,325, then Constanța, Prahova, and Argeș, all somewhere between a quarter and three-tenths of the same ceiling. At the other end, Tulcea hadn't passed 98,677 cars by 2024 — under seven percent of the reservoir it could theoretically draw from.

The gap between these percentages and Bucharest's actual 2010 situation shows just how far behind the rest of the country really is. Even Cluj, the closest county, would need to roughly triple its fleet to reach where the capital stood sixteen years ago — and even that might not be quite enough, for the reasons above.

V · Ilfov is growing differently

The one county that might actually get there

One county doesn't follow the general pattern. Ilfov's active fleet grew from 102,346 cars in 2012 to 301,883 in 2024 — nearly tripling in twelve years, the fastest growth rate in the country. For comparison, Cluj, which started from a fleet more than twice as large, grew more slowly, by a factor of just 1.97 over the same stretch.

Ilfov isn't growing because it has more cities. It's growing because it wraps around one — Bucharest — and absorbs, year after year, the people and cars that no longer fit, or no longer want to stay, inside the capital. If the current pace held steady, a simple extrapolation from the 2012–2024 growth rate would put Ilfov's fleet past 1,422,234 sometime in the mid-2040s — an extrapolation, not a prediction, since growth rates rarely stay constant for two decades running.

VI · What's left

One combination out of 1,422,234, once

The number on a license plate looks like the most anonymous figure imaginable — assigned automatically, with no connection to its owner, forgotten the moment the car changes hands or heads to the scrapyard. And yet each combination was, at some point, the only one of its kind still available out of exactly 1,422,234, chosen once and, more often than not, never handed back to the reservoir. Bucharest showed, in 2010, what it means to empty that reservoir. The rest of the country still has room — just not the same amount everywhere, and at the capital's edge, that room is closing at a pace no other county is matching.