I don’t get the thing where people believe that the whole DMV Hate is some Vast Right Wing Conspiracy when the most liberal state in the Union California infamously has some of the worst DMV’s, and it’s not like it’s some Conservative Deep State Conspiracy that they’re bad, they’re just badly managed period.
When I switched my plates from Wisconsin to Arizona it took literally hours because they apparently only had one person qualified to eyeball your car and check it to make sure it’s roadworthy, and they also did all the other normal stuff, too. And I think every kid in Tucson was there getting their license.
SInce they put in those kiosks getting your license plate renewal sticker has been a breeze. Go do emissions then go to the MVD next door, go in and go to the kiosk and you’re out in 3 minutes.
When I sold my Corsica I had to get a replacement title as I’d lost the old one. The MVD guy looked so defeated when I sat down. He asked if I owned it outright I said yes, I owned the car outright. He confessed I was the first one that day that said that that was telling the truth.
All things considered, I haven’t found the DMV in Hudson County or Bergen County NJ (or as we call it, the DMC) to be particularly arduous, given how densely populated those areas are. Which may have something to do with it. If it were that inefficient, they would quickly become overwhelmed.
But inefficient public service has nothing to do with being “evil and socialist”. IMHO, it has more to do with the following:
a) A need to serve EVERYONE, as opposed to the private sector who can pick and choose their customers based on profitability.
b) Public sector tends to focus on reliability, predictability and process, rather than innovation or entrepreneurship.
c) Because of b), public sector tends to attract workers more interested in sitting in their chair for 30 years and collecting a pension vs kicking ass and innovating.
d) The whole decision making process tends to be slow and bureaucratic in the public sector because…I don’t know…government. There’s a lot more oversight than business. I suppose it’s because if a mistake happens, some bureaucrat can keep his job by being like “according to the 80 page proposal, IBM was the best option. Who would have thought they would have screwed up?”
At my last job, I had to lead some proposal teams for a bunch of government work we were targeting. These were small projects that basically amounted to bringing in a facilitator to run a number of meetings over a period of time. These are jobs I would expect a recent 25 year old MBA grad working at any management consulting firm could do. And yet, these proposals were like 60-80 pages long.
I know of a guy who used to write for a car site who literally said that if you’re an employee of a government agency/public sector, you’re a leech.
of course, his definition of “leftist” is “anyone who disagrees with me about anything.”
In MA, we have had a few crisis with the RMV. It seems they had a room they tossed the snail mail letters from other states that had license suspension notices. It was a big room, this was going on for years. Then one of our new ‘visitors to these shores’ drivers played pinball with a flock of bikers in NH, and all hell broke loose.
The biggest problem is the Turnpike Authority automated it’s tolls. (You know, the ones that should have been payed off and ripped down in the early 1980’s, but I digress…) This meant that every one’s useless, unemployable in-laws suddenly needed a new job.
Computerization has helped, but between needing a new mug shot every 10 years and the ‘Real ID’ kabuki theatre, we still have to darken the RMV doorway every once in a while.
Side Note: Why is it that I have had the same plates on my car since Ronnie was President? I have paid off a house mortgage since I got those plates!
I have a passport but I’m getting one so that I don’t have to shlep it around when I travel domestically. My license goes in my wallet - my passport would be something else to put in a shirt pocket, since I wouldn’t want to stash it in my computer bag. Women don’t have this problem.
The problem is that conservatives keep harping on how awful California DMVs are despite testimony to the contrary. My last couple of visits have been fine, as good as or better than my experience in other states.
Here in NC many of the places you can get a plate for your car are run by private businesses, not by the DMV. Most people don’t go there to renew their plate now since you can do that online. Those places typically are now used to transfer a plate when you buy or sell a car.
I’ve found the same thing that many others have commented on – that things are much better than they used to be, due to a combination of factors including better technology leading to more streamlined operations, the ability to do things online, and consequently less crowded offices. In my current location, I’m in and out of the local office typically in just a few minutes. If there’s a wait at all, it’s usually just one person in front of me.
I think one of the reasons the DMV became a sort of poster child for government inefficiency is that the work they do is insufferably boring and there’s no obvious incentive to be more efficient, but somehow they’ve introduced efficiencies anyway.
At one time the government-run liquor stores here were the same kind of insufferably boring drabness, where in fact it was considered in rather bad taste to openly display the products, so you walked in to this sort of drab decrepit place that looked like it might be an illegal betting shop or something, and indicated what you wanted by writing it down on a small form, based on a list of products displayed on a board. Then you handed it to some old codger behind the counter who skulked off and brought you the stuff and put it in a plain paper bag. Liquor stores have changed even more dramatically than the DMV, even though they’re still 100% government owned. Today they’re large, bright cheery places stocking one of the largest varieties of liquor found in any retailer anywhere, often running sales and promotions and tastings, and featuring a vintage wines section that is usually more elegant than the rest of the store, sometimes featuring an entirely separate room that could be mistaken for the library of an English country house or a millionaire’s wine cellar. And yet this happened without the pressure of any competition whatsoever, as the government liquor stores continue to operate as a monopoly, except for the limited ability to get some domestic wines in grocery stores. I think it’s just a change in culture, and a shift from regarding wines and liquors as “evil” to regarding them as part of modern life.
Just to correct the impression this post might leave. The NJ MVC replaced the terrible NJDMV. Wait times have dramatically reduced and many services can now be done online. This has happened over the last 15 years.
The old jokes about the DMV were pretty accurate for NJ, NY and California, I know at in New Jersey it is dramatically better.
I bet this plays a big role in this.
I’ve heard it described as the rule of thirds: in any organization, a third are superstars, a third are deadweight, and a third are just doing their jobs - earning their pay.
We might debate the percentages - I’d probably rate it top down as close to 10%/70%/20%. And there are likely factors to increase productivity. But yeah - any organization over a certain size is going to have a large chunk of employees just “doing an average job.”
The other factor with most pubic services is, people love to complain, but are they willing to pay what it take to improve it? Many public organizations are amazingly efficient - at least in terms of administrative costs.
For some reason this reminds me of an article I read years ago about an attempt to replace the NJDMV computer system in the early 1980s. Contrary to standard practice, and for reasons that sounded more than a tad hinkey, the job was turned over to the accounting firm that had done the initial analysis (one argument being that the state IT staff was made up of civil servants who had no incentive to do a good job). Problems arose when it turned out that the spiffy new fourth-generation language being used couldn’t handle anything close to the volume of transactions required, but the firm decided to push ahead anyway because they were under a politically sensitive deadline.
So the old (creaky but functional) system was turned off and the new system turned on with no rollback provision. When NJDMV personnel attempted to use it, they found that logging in took up to an hour and response time could be three minutes. In addition, “overnight” batch update jobs took several days.
After that, durn near anything they came up with would be an improvement.
Ministry of Transportation for us, at least in Ontario. The other provinces might have something different that does the same thing. My experience falls into mostly painless, as I usually pick the day and time that i visit when it comes time to renew. They want to know the odometer reading and insurnance policy number and the actual plate number. Cell phone camera’s make that really easy instead of bringing everything paper in. I think it could be better, but that would mean the govt would have to institute some changes in data collection and retention.
If I had to chose between going to the local DMV or the A T and T or Apple Store - I’d go to the DMV every time.
At least the people behind the desk at the DMV don’t get bonuses when they screw you over.
It’s also an issue that the vehicle license branch is the only government agency that everybody has to submit to, every year, for their entire lives.
With other govt agencies, you usually only have one hassle, once or twice in your life. (say,getting a building permit, a business license, even a tax audit). And while you’re doing these type of things, you don’t stand in long lines, and the others nearby are people similar to yourself…you don’t physically rub shoulders with people from social strata lower than yours.
I got the other day a notice that I have to get a license with a more current photo on it and a recommendation that I get a RealD (and pay $25 for the privilege). Not having a certified birth certificate, I’ll have to bring in a passport but it is expired. Do you know if that’s okay?
In Carson City the MVD office has a huge sign behind the clerks: We don’t care that’s not they way they do in in California.
Yep, you have to deal with anyone- from the most slow and unsteady elderly person, to the most energetic twenty-something, and from the most on-the-ball college kid to borderline special needs people. Rich and poor. Healthy and sick. And so on…
This is primarily because there’s no payoff to innovation or entrepreneurship. When you have to serve everyone and there’s no profit being made, things that speed up the process basically make it harder for the workers and don’t do anything that benefits the govt. agency. I mean, what’s it to them if they process 75 or 125 driver’s license applications per day? They don’t get bonuses, the department doesn’t make money from it, and there’s no bottom-line to look at. The only thing it really does, outside from process more customers, is make everyone’s job more fast-paced and stressful.
True- but don’t get the impression they’re not dedicated. They’re just not motivated by the same things that people are in the private sector. Without the profit motive driving everything to be faster, more efficient and more customer-focused, the workers tend to concentrate on doing their jobs well- reliable, predictable and exact.
Working in municipal government for a couple of years now, after 20 years in the private sector, it’s likely because of one main thing. Anything that has to do with spending money is bound by a bunch of arcane and weird regulations surrounding budget cycles, transparency and the like. Anything over a certain amount has to go before some sort of elected official, and even things under that threshold still have to go through an tortuous official purchasing process that may involve lowest bidders, existing contracts, minority preferences, preferred vendors, and so on. Hiring people is fraught with gotchas- since people are apparently prone to sueing government agencies when they’re not hired, the interview process is as much an exercise in legal CYA as it is trying to find the appropriate person. And salaries are often contentious- managers/dept. heads can’t just determine appropriate pay by the market rate for that experience and skill set; they have to also run it through the HR department and make sure it’s aligned with similar positions elsewhere in the organization.
Things that don’t cost money can just be dealt with outright, and often are. But few things anywhere don’t have some kind of cost associated with them, so they often run afoul of all this stuff where in a private enterprise, some middle-manager would have the authority and budget to just make a decision and pay for it.
I think a lot of the gripe with the DMV is centered around the fact that it’s not customer-centric in the way that a lot of private businesses are, and that the mix of people is a lot like riding public transit. So you get people who are used to going to a store where everyone looks/acts/smells more or less like them, and where the staff is going out of their way to please them (because there are competitors doing the same thing elsewhere), and then they go to the DMV, where you have everyone- rich, poor, smelly, perfumed, old, young, small kids, English-speaking or not, etc… all waiting together in a deathly boring room, and the staff is mostly indifferent to whether or not it’s taking longer than they want, and aren’t going out of their way to accommodate them (but not deliberately screwing around either), and they view this as terrible.
US States make moving with a vehicle more complicated than European countries, which is kind of curious considering how much the car is a central part of American life. Part of that is simply the requirement to transfer the vehicle itself ASAP, whereas in our case you’re only required to do it in some countries and it’s not straightaway. For example, if I was moving to Spain with a foreign car, I’d need to register the car with my local City Hall (which I’d be able to do at the same time I register my residence there), so that City Hall would know to charge me the Road Tax; I’d need to find out the calendar for compulsory government check-ups and make sure I was in compliance, but Tráfico (which is country-wide) would be sending me SMSs (if they had my number, also recorded with City Hall) and physical letters (definitely) to remind me anyway.
No, it is absolutely current reality. About ten years ago the Vermont Motor Vehicle Department completely retooled their main location, installing a comfortable waiting room with comfy chairs, a couple of (then-new) flatscreen TVs playing CNN, an electronic ticketing system that chimed every so often to call the next person down the hallway to the appropriate counter, and adequate staffing to keep the wait times down.
It was wonderful.
About four years later they removed the comfortable waiting room, replaced the counters with cubicles in mid-Soviet grey, replaced the comfy chairs with hard folding chairs, and lost the CNN. The only thing they kept was the ticketing system.
The entire experience is now only slightly less preferable to being sent to the Gulag that it so closely resembles.