similar layers. Occasionally, drivers who adorn their licence plate with a badge of their favourite football club are fined and ordered to restore the original state. Constituent elements Area Code The first part or consists of one, two or three letters representing the district where the car was registered, such as B for Berlin or HSK for Hochsauerlandkreis. These letters formerly coincided with the German districts. They were assigned unambiguously, as each district had one abbreviation only. Whenever a district changed its name or was merged with another, the area code would be redefined and any vehicle registered henceforth could only be issued the current code. Since 2013, however, this rule was revoked and area codes long abolished were re-introduced. In consequence, many districts use more than one code, and certain codes, on the other hand, are not assigned to one district only. In some cases an urban district and the surrounding non-urban district share the same letter code. Usually, these are distinguished by different letter/digit patterns. For example, the urban district of has one letter after the area code (SR-A 123), whereas the surrounding district has two letters (SR-AB 123) in this place. However, several cities that share their code with the surrounding rural districts have started using any available codes for both districts without any distinction; the city of , for example, and the surrounding rural district of used different systems with their code R only until 2007. Germany includes diacritical marks in the letters of some codes, that is the letters Ö and Ü; formerly also Ä. For a long time, German codes kept to the rule that a code with an umlaut would prohibit another code with the respective blank vowel, e.g. there could not be a district code FU as the code FÜ was already in use for Fürth. This rule was disregarded in 1996, when BÖ was introduced for Bördekreis in spite of BO existing for Bochum. Development of the area code When the area codes were introduced, they were intended mainly as a means for police officers to identify speeders and other traffic offenders. However, they soon developed into everyday abbreviations of people's home areas and were cherished or despised. Sometimes, the codes of neighbouring districts were given mocking or spiteful meanings. When districts merged and only one of their codes could be continued, fierce battles might ensue about which one. The Büsingen