I think people are forgetting or weren’t around in the days when the DMV , etc. got the terrible reputation. I see people mentioning seats and appointments - those didn’t exist 40 years ago, nor did the ability to complete any transactions on-line. I had to wait on line to get the forms, wait on another line to hand in the the forms, and another one to pay. Possibly the eye test was also a separate line. And pretty much everyone had to show up there to renew their license unless you paid an optometrist.
Now, I haven’t been to a DMV since I got an enhanced license - I can renew online and can take my eye test at a drug store , which costs maybe $8. I don’t have to register any vehicles in person since I no longer buy used cars from private parties (dealers take care of registration). I will have to go in person if I ever change my address if I want the new license to be Real ID compliant, but aside from that I don’t expect to ever walk into DMV again.
But there is something I want to point out - it’s always DMV that had the reputation, but that’s only because that’s the government agency that most people encounter in person. The Social Security office , the food stamp office - they were all the same. Except that you might only go to the SS office twice in your life and not everyone ever went to the food stamp office.
Thing was that in the early 1990s all kinds of interactions with bureaucracy was slow and cumbersome because IT and networking was much more limited.
In the early 1990s I had a root canal and a post and crown. The bureaucracy of getting this pre-approved and paid was staggering.
In the mid 1990s I was arrested and jailed on a bogus charge. I posted $800 bail. Charges were dismissed nine months later. Getting my $800 back took years. If it wasn’t for my wife absolutely not being willing to let it go, I would have given it up.
On the other hand I’ve had many interactions with the RMV/DMV/BMV in seven states over the last 37 years. Except for the first one in NYC getting my first drivers license, none of them even make the top-20 of my bureaucratic hall of shame. Most of those have been private companies (medical providers, insurers and financial institutions) with a sprinkling of very local government (towns with fewer than 10,000 residents, where you would think every vote would count).
Amazingly my interactions with the IRS (three audits) all went well. Two of the three were triggered by the incompetence of my then employer (overseas employer and stock options) and one by my own mistake. I never had to send them anything more than once.
Trying to get reimbursed for my 2023 eye exam and glasses is still ongoing.
Ever since COVID, our Motor Vehicles Administration (MVA) office has required appointments for anything and everything. No more walk-ins. And when you book your appointment, you get a list of exactly what you need to bring to do what you want to do. So if you can read and follow simple directions, it’s easy-peasy, altho sometimes the wait times take you past your appointment time. No one should be too shocked at that. But overall, it’s not been terrible at our local office. I can’t speak to the system in general.
All true. Long ago it was worse. In some cases way worse.
It’s unclear to me which “people” you’re referring to. I’m not disagreeing w you, just not quite following you.
IOW, is the mistake the people who remember that era harping now about how bad it “is” when they really mean “was”, or the young (?) people now who don’t know how it ever was and think it’s fine. Or who think that the fact everything can’t be done on their phone is a ridiculous 19th century imposition in their 21st-century life?
My own take is that it’s foolish in 2024 to bitch about the DMV as the proverbial worstest possible bureaucracy. Unless that’s really how bad your local one is in 2024, and even then you (any you) need to qualify your complaint with “around here in [wherever]”.
You make the excellent point that DMV is one of the very few bureaucracies that everyone gets to visit in person. Albeit less often now than in Ye Olden Dayes of Yore. But still everyone is required to go there sometimes.
About one out of every ten times I’ve visited the DMV, it’s been a royal pain in the ass and will be remembered for the rest of my life. The other nine times are completely uneventful and unmemorable . Thus, the DMV deserves its horrible reputation.
I dunno. I’ve never really had significant issues w/ the “DMV” here in Illinois. Like you say, people love to act as tho they should have a concierge-type experience, but ask them to pony up the taxes to pay for that…
And people love to criticize the attitude and work ethic of the employees, but I’ve never gotten the impression that it is the sort of job that encouraged and rewarded going over and above in terms of customer service. Each of us undoubtedly prides themself as being a fully informed and prepared, low maintenance customer, but I suggest not all folk in the DMV are as well prepared/informed.
But I don’t think I’ve ever had to wait more than ten or fifteen minutes; appointment or no appointment. And you can do a lot of things by mail or online, now.
I however existed a good bit more than 40 years ago, and was in a DMV office a good bit more often in the 1970’s and 80’s than I am now. I think it depends on which particular offices you’re using; and that quite a lot of them are fine, but some of them are awful, and awful tends to stick in the brain better than fine; especially when “fine” is always at least “an unavoidable nuisance I wish I didn’t have to deal with, even though it turned out to take about 15 minutes total and everybody was competent and polite.”
The local DMV works quite well. When I needed to get my license renewed, it took about half an hour and that was upgrading to a real ID license.
My experience with the state DMV fit the cliche. I was working in Albany, so that was more convenient. I was reregistering a car I’d been given and the clerk said I had to pay sales tax on the Blue Book value of the car. But the car was older and had more miles, so the clerk said I could get a document to that effect.
When I went back, I had the letter. The clerk tried to make it the Blue Book value and pay sales tax accordingly. I told her that they said I could use the letter.
“Who told you that?” she said.
I looked around. The original clerk was already heading in my direction. “Her,” I said.
She backed me up. The second clerk said I might be billed, but I think that was just saving face; I never got one.
This all seems to be a strange mix of old-fashioned horse-and-buggy methods and modern computerised systems.
Over here it’s almost all done online. Drivers’ licences here double up as photo-Id and often, the hard part is getting an acceptable photo. Fortunately, the same one works for passports as well so it’s only once a decade.
Registering a new (to you) car is also done online although a document arrives in the post after a week or so.
I give them a pass if you just drop in since they are constantly working … just a lot of customers.
What I do not give them a pass on is that due to the way their database operates you can only transact business in your home county. That means that if I need to reregister my car late, get my title, &c … basically anything I can’t do online, I need to drive 2 hours from work to the one DMV office in the far corner of my county seat and be there by 4:30pm.
That’s also generally the case in the USA. Especially for a car (new or used) bought from a dealer. Less so for a used car bought from another ordinary citizen.
A big difference is that unlike the unitary UK, the US has 50+ different registering / licensing authorities, one for each state, territory, etc. Unless you live in the center of one of the large states, it’s pretty common to buy a car from another state. Which will necessitate an in-person visit to the bureaucracy. If you move household in-state, the DMV can almost certainly process your address change online. But if you move across a state boundary you will need to visit the new state’s DMV for new in-state driver license(s) and new state plates and registration and title for your car(s).
As @Saint_Cad just said, in many states the actual customer interface part of the process is outsourced by the state to their several counties. It’s certainly common to buy one from another county within your home state. Which may necessitate an in-person visit to the bureaucracy.
Where I currently live (not in the US), you can apply for a driver’s licence (or changes to it) at a government office, which I suppose would be the equivalent of a DMV, or at any of dozens (hundreds?) of insurance companies and auto clubs that the government licenses to do this on their behalf. I’ve always done it at the local auto club, which has been an entirely painless process. There’s never been any line, so I’ve always been served immediately. The person at the counter just takes down my info, takes my photo if necessary, takes the fee, and then tells me that my new card will arrive by mail. The total time spent in the office is probably 10 minutes, and the ID arrives by mail a couple weeks later.
I’ve visited (on unrelated business) a few private insurance companies that also offer driver’s licence services. As with the auto club, there’s never been any line to wait in, so I assume the process would be just as fast with them.
In this case I needed an eye test and a new photo for my renewed driver’s license, so it could not be done online.
What happened was that I had called the DMV several weeks early to ask a question about my license renewal. The phone clerk told me I’d have to go in to the office, and she said she made an appointment for me. But when I went to the DMV, they said I didn’t have an appointment. By that time my license was going to expire soon so I felt I had no choice but to wait in the line with the people without appointments.
The line went all the way around the building. It took an hour just to get into the building. They did say that if you made it inside you would be served that day no matter how late it was. Although the doors closed at 4 pm, the clerks were still working many hours past then. I assume they were paid a lot of overtime.
In California, at least, the DMV will only accept a photo that they take themselves in their office. Passport photos are not accepted. Another reason why we have to go there sometimes.
The people I’m referring to are the ones who don’t understand why/how the DMV got the terrible reputation to begin with. And I forgot one factor - the hours. They used to only be open during business hours , even when banks had some evening hours. They weren’t open Saturdays. Like many other government agencies , the hours were set for the convenience of the staff, not the clientele. To this day , the DMV in my state is not open weekends and although they used to have some evening hours , they don’t seem to anymore.
I think a lot of the hate/irritation with the DMV is more because it’s the one government agency that nearly everyone has to interact with in person, and because it’s where the customer expectations created by decades of for-profit enterprises catering to them (“the customer is always right”) breaks against the reality of not-for-profit public sector workers doing their jobs.
By that I mean that you have to look at it from the other side. When you go to a for-profit company for some good or service, you have choices. You can go to their competitors if you don’t like the way you’re being treated, or the speed with which they accomplish their tasks, etc…
You don’t have that with the DMV. There isn’t any competition. And by extension, there’s no incentive for the workers to go above and beyond- there’s no more money earned by processing more renewals, and if there was, it’s not like there are bonuses to anyone in the chain of command.
So you get people who are willing to do the job and do it well, but who aren’t motivated by fear of getting fired for not being properly obsequious, and who aren’t going to benefit by working any harder either. Plus, they see hundreds of people daily who are all in a hurry, didn’t plan ahead, need to pick up their kids, or whatever. I’m sure every one of them has heard it all a thousand times. So they may or may not prioritize that sort of thing- there’s no profit motive driving them to make you happy, remember?
Put differently, the expectations of customer service that are raised in for-profit companies don’t necessarily hold true in government agencies. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not doing their jobs well, it means that you don’t know what their jobs are and how they’re evaluated for doing them.
It took me quite a while to get a handle on how things worked when I started work in the public sector. Eventually I realized that the fear of being fired wasn’t generally there like it is in the private sector, and that nor were any sort of profit-sharing/revenue based bonuses either. So the attitudes are different- less carrot or stick, and more internally driven.
No really, because that’s what they seem to be calling the greater DC area these days. The acronym, in this usage, stands for DC, Maryland, and Virginia.
The DC and Virginia parts of the DMV have DMVs for all your tags, title, and license renewal stuff. In Maryland, it’s the MVA.
Can’t recall ever having a problem with the DMV in VA or the MVA in MD; never been a DC resident.
I much prefer going to the DMV than going to the Verizon store to get a new phone turned on. The time is about the same, though I don’t need an appointment at Verizon, but on the other hand no one at the DMV tries to sell me a Netflix subscription or upsell me anything.