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My hunch is they require you to enter your license plate number, so you can't hand off your spot to another driver when you leave before your time is up.

In fact the main goal of the plate number is to use cameras with plate number recognition to automatically generate the fines

It is both to stop tickets being transferred but is also to help the number of complaints about "I bought a ticket but it fell off my dashboard". At least this way, it is easy to check.

Also, if you use the app, you don't need to use the machine although for some reason, we seem to have at least 10 different parking apps in the UK. Not sure who decides that we need another parking app.

They're often owned by car companies (PayByPhone is VW, RingGo is BMW/Daimler).

So maybe Peugeot?

These machines (at least the one I have used in Cambridge MA) have you pay by entering your license plate instead of parking spot number.

Even in places that only have numeric plates I assume they are not going to make a numbers-only version of the machine

I've seen a lot that go by stall number and it prints the receipt you put on your dash.

Saw one recent that did license plate.