NY personalized license plates

Data on New York personalized license plate applications received from the New York DMV in response to a July 2014 FOIL request. Covers applications from 10/1/2010 to 9/26/2014.

Learn about NY personalized plates

Contents

• accepted-plates.csv: CSV of plate applications that were accepted and issued, with order date and plate configuration.
• rejected-plates.csv: CSV of plate applications that were rejected by the department, with order date and plate configuration.
• red-guide.csv: A copy of the Red Guide, the list of "inappropriate" plate configurations that are automatically disallowed by the New York DMV as of July 2015.
• procedure.pdf: A document listing the DMV's plate review and cancellation procedures as of June 2014.

Notes

• This data may contain explicit or offensive language.
• Plate configurations in accepted-plates.csv may have since been revoked by the DMV.
• Plate configurations in rejected-plates.csv were rejected by the department. It does not include plates that were reserved, banned by the Red Guide, or cancelled for administrative reasons.
• Some plate configurations may exist in multiple applications.
• A small number of rows may contain erroneous data because of Excel cell formatting in the original prepared files.
• Although the DMV collects an explanation of the requested combination from each online applicant, that information is not preserved.

Processing

The original files were in Microsoft Excel format. They have been converted to CSV (comma-separated values) file for more broad use. The following commands were used to process:

in2csv "original/Copy of NYS DMV Personalized Plate Orders October 1 2010 through September 26 2014 (duplicates highlighted).xlsx" | sed -e '1s/Date Personalized Plate was Ordered/date/' -e '1s/Personalized Plate Configuration Requested/plate/' | csvcut -x | csvsort -c "date" > rejected-plates.csv > accepted-plates.csv && \
in2csv "original/Copy of NYS DMV Rejected Personalized Plate Orders October 1 2010 through September 26 2014 (response - 2014-6130).xlsx" | sed -e '1s/       Date Personalized Plate was Ordered/date/' -e '1s/        Personalized Plate Configuration Requested and Denied/plate/' | csvcut -x | csvsort -c "date" > rejected-plates.csv && \
csvstat accepted-plates.csv && csvstat rejected-plates.csv;