That’s pretty much my experience too. I visit my local equivalent, the NSW Roads & Traffic Authority, once every five years to renew my driver’s licence. I think last time it took about five minutes.
Sure. But if that’s the cause of the problem, there should be similar division between larger and smaller states in the US. But so far, that division hasn’t shown up in the comments of the US Dopers who have been grumbling about their DMV. And, the most favourable comment about a US DMV came from mhendo in California.
The California DMV does an amazing job of handling so many people - roughly one out of every eight drivers in the United States is in California, and has, at one point or another, waited while the ethereal voice incessantly intones “Now serving. B-35. At window 10. Now serving G-95. At window 3. Now serving C-42. At window 25.”
So, it’s not surprising that there’s going to be a bit of a wait. Bring a book. The good news is that they’ve managed to make a lot of stuff so it can be done online or by mail.
The DMV is the single worst thing on the planet.
In Los Angeles, be prepared to wait 3.5 hours. Some people will often inform you, always with great huff and smarm, that if you’d only made an appointment, you would have to suffer with less indignity upon the sticky floors in the crowd of screaming babies. This is true, but it still takes an hour of holding on the phone to even make an appointment, and once you arrive the appointment line is 15 minutes long. There is absolutely nothing you can do to make dealing with the DMV anything but a time-consuming and miserable experience.
On top of this, once you get to deal with an actual human being (I struggle to use the term) it WILL be the same lazy dipshit who wanted to copy your homework in high school. It will be a rude, horrid human being who smears Cheeto crumbs on his shirt while grunting in response to everything you have to say. He doesn’t know the answer to any questions, and is incapable of doing *anything *besides putting your $40 in a drawer and (slowly) producing a sheet of paper temporarily renewing your license while the plastic comes in the mail. These are seriously the worst people in existence. For this reason, I’ve been renewing my license by mail ever since I found out I could.
I will say the Hollywood DMV is slightly better. It’s smaller, and once I even got in and out (sans appointment!) in about one hour. The person I dealt with wasn’t even an epic bitch. I told her, “You know, you’re the only DMV worker I’ve ever dealt with who wasn’t completely useless as a human being.” She laughed. I told her, “No, I’m being completely serious.” She laughed even harder. I was, though. I was being 100% serious.
I actually renewed my CA drivers license by mail, and will continue to do so until this is no longer an option. Then, and only then, will I drag myself into the MN DMV and get a MN license.
It depends on where you go, to be honest. I have ceased going to the Albany DMV because it seems like they don’t get paid if you ever get everything done that you need to the first time. They have all of these forms and they are completely non-helpful and obnoxious, and worse, downright rude if they think you are sub-par. Like, I got a ticket for failure to have insurance, and my license was suspended. This is years ago when I was dirt-poor. Anyway I got it all straightened out and got insurance and went to the DMV to pay my fines, and the lady was so fucking condesceding…and then they’re loud, too, so everyone can know what a fuck-up you are. It’s like they endeavor to make it as humiliating and painful
Now I go to the Troy DMV. Those people practically come out from behind the counter to help you and they are super-nice.
Wow. DMV experiences vary a lot. When I got my license (Nassau Cty., Long Island) in 1988 the DMV was every bit as horrible as the worst of these stories. Nowadays, in NJ, it’s a breeze. I thought all (or most) DMVs had made similar improvements over the last 20 years. Sorry to hear that they haven’t.
We have lots of small local MVS offices instead of big central ones. I had to go 2 times in quick succession last year, and each trip was quick and easy. (Transferring a car title and renewing and replacing a lost license at the same time.) Total waiting time in both cases was about 10 minutes. Everyone was polite and helpful. I was treated like a customer rather than a rat in a cage.
One thing I noticed is that the same counter person could take care of all the different aspects of the transaction, from the paperwork to taking payment. That made things much more convenient than having to wait in multiple lines. It’s probably better for the worker too because it’s a little less boring and repetitive and allows an opportunity for a pleasant interaction. I only had to go to someone else to have my picture taken. And the picture lady even showed me the pic and asked if I wanted it re-taken!
But the thought of the DMV still gives me a shudder. The bad ones are really that bad.
I think the local MVS offices might benefit from the horrible reputation of the DMV. It’s pretty easy to exceed such low expectations.
Huh?
You can make an appointment online. Takes about 3 minutes.
The first time I made a DMV appointment was in the dark ages, meaning 1999, and I do not believe CA’s DMV website was so accommodating at the time. Still, the appointment line is 15 minutes long, and dealing with the cretins who work at the DMV makes me envious of prison guards.
You know, you can petition the people you elect to make changes in this system.
AAA does this in Northern California also.
I suspect much of the dislike is from people who got their first license 40 years ago in a big city. I got mine in New York, and there were long lines, it was crowded, and it was dirty. The good old days, right? I suspect that large cities are always going to have crowds at convenient times. However, the DMV near me is perfect, especially when you have an appointment, and the people are friendly. Drivers licenses and registrations are renewed by mail. Smog checks require you to take your car into a private garage, but they are electronically connected to the DMV, so no paperwork.
Yeah, the buildings are not exactly ritzy, but if they were the usual suspects would be complaining on spending taxpayer money on palaces, so the state can’t win.
Well, again, i’ll ask the question i raised in an earlier post: would you be willing to pay more taxes and/or higher licensing and registration fees to alleviate these problems? If not, what would you suggest they do about them?
Also, how do you know the system is not efficient? The fact that it takes a long time, and requires multiple steps, doesn’t mean that it’s inefficient. When i got my license at the California DMV, i had to wait in about 5 lines and see about 5 different people, and while i had to wait for a while overall, it still struck me as a relatively efficient system. Every person i saw processed their part of my transaction quickly and courteously, allowing me to move on to the next stage with minimal fuss.
I’m no expert in time and motion studies, and even if i were i haven’t spent enough time at the DMV to determine whether or not they could make things more efficient, but the simple fact that you have to endure multiple steps and/or wait for extended periods does not make the system inefficient. You’re probably right that more employees would make it faster, but they might not make it more efficient, and they would have to be paid for. Are you willing to pay?
Wow. not 15 whole minutes! How do you bear it?
As for the “cretins,” i can only reiterate that every DMV employee i’ve encountered in California has been a model of of friendly and courteous professionalism. I’m sorry if your local branch is not the same.
Anecdotal: I just got my green card (US Permanent Residency card) renewed. I sat in an “Application Support Center” for while, had my fingerprints (sorry, “biometrics”) taken, and was given a sticker for the back of my old card, and informed that my new card would arrive in a year. Total time elapsed: 1 hour, 25 minutes.
Guess how long it took me to get my driver’s license renewed last time? 4 hours.
Simply unbearable. I’d imagine the 3-5 hour waits are only slightly more so for people who don’t have internet access. Also, these appointments are usually only available, oh, starting about 105 years into the future. If anything needs to be done immediately (or even within the next two-four weeks), you just have to suck it up and go down there and wait for an eternity. So the animosity toward the DMV is largely that it takes a bothersome amount of time for anything to get done, and the staff is generally reprehensible. You’ve managed to find this group of courteous and useful DMV workers who I’m sure exist – I actually saw one once! – but seem to be rare. That or you have an incredibly high threshold for bullshit.
Anecdote time:
I know a guy who lost his license a couple of years ago. He couldn’t get it renewed without a birth certificate. The city hall wouldn’t give him a copy of his birth certificate without ID. This went back and forth for several weeks, each shitty bureaucracy enforcing their shitty pointless rules, all the while this guy is driving illegally without a legal identity. Finally, one of the bureaucracies, I forget which, allows him to bring a note from his doctor verifying his identity. The doctor won’t do it without an ID because, face it, it isn’t really the doctor’s job. Finally, after several months, we got my aunt (well known in our family for getting things accomplished over the phone with her particular flavor of effective bitchiness) to persuade the doctor to just write the note and end this silly government dance. Your tax dollars at work, folks.
For the record, my DMV is in East St. Louis, and it is without a doubt the most miserable place in that town. And that is saying something.
Virginia resident for 20+ years and we’ve never had any special problem with the local DMV. Sure, you go during peak times and you’ll wait, but the last 2 times I’ve had transactions (once to turn in some license plates from a car I’d sold, and most recently to renew my license) it was smooth sailing. I walked in, got a number, sat down until my number was called; went up to the appropriate desk, conducted my business, and left. The time from number-calling to leaving was less than 10 minutes both times.
Arguably, if we’d ever had to conduct less-straightforward business, it may not have gone so smoothly.
My one experience with Washington DC’s bureaucracy, however… Oy vey. This was 21 years ago. We had a short-term apartment rental, and needed to get a parking permit to be able to park our car on the street. Otherwise, I think, the cops would have noticed it after a few weeks of seeing it around, decided we were trying to violate some DC law that required us to register a car within x weeks of moving into the city, and ticket us accordingly.
So, we trotted down to the DMV office (or whatever office it was that handled such things), assorted paperwork in hand.
Waited in line a bit at window 1, where we paid a fee and got a receipt.
Waited in line a bit at window 2, where we had someone who reviewed the receipt and the paperwork, and stamped something saying we could have the permit.
Waited in line a bit at window 3, where someone looked at the stamped form from window 2, glared at us, and gave us the permit.
As this whole transaction took less than 2 hours start to finish, I think we got off lightly. I’ve heard horror stories about DC DMV visits.
I just came home from getting my registration renewed. I figured I’d time it and then post in this thread.
One minute.
That is not a whoosh. I walked in the door at 4:43 and the clerk was already saying “May I help you” before I’d cleared the threshhold. I handed him my paperwork and started writing my check; he had to ask me if I wanted to donate to some fund or another; he gave me my sticker and I gave him the check. I walked out the door and checked the time.
**4:44. **
Before that, I had had to go to the E-check station to get my E-check. “Odious” is the generally acknowledged opinion of this process, but at least now it is free. (E-check is an emissions test that must be passed before plates and renewals can be issued.) In and out in two minutes.
After that, I had a check to deposit in the drive-through at the bank. That was the spit in my tapiioca. One teller working four lanes. It took me eight minutes just to give them money.
State of Ohio, you had it going on today.
I’m in MA also. I have had generally good experiences with the DMV (try Watertown). A lot of it was due to a fellow named Daniel Grabauskas who ran the agency several years back and tried to make it more user friendly by improving the operation of the registry offices and taking advantage of on-line capabilities. (He ended up running the MBTA and recently got kicked out for, in the opinion of some, trying to do his job right. He was holding off on fare increases that the Governor and Secretary of Transportation wanted, while those two actively denied it.)
Recently with budget cuts MA is facing office closings. More dramatically, they no longer send out notifications of expiration of registrations or driver’s licenses (I think it is.) You’re supposed to ‘remember’. I know several people who got a nasty surprise this way - they’d been driving around with expired licenses. Fortunately they were able to correct it before running afoul of the police.
People have commented here that the DMV is the ‘government point of contact’ for the vast majority of the public. Another factor is that if anyone has a problem, they are going to find complete inflexibility on the part of the DMV. Rules are rules with no margin for change, and many are going to find that frustrating. People will complain widely about their negative experiences, but no one goes around talking about the things that went right.
Here’s how to fix the damn DMV in New York. When you come in there’s 1 (maybe 2) people who run triage when you come in, telling what forms you need, routing you to the photo line, etc. This is bottleneck 1: they need about 5 of these triage officers to get the line moving. I waited for 40 minutes because there were 50 people ahead of me at 11:00. This just to get forms.
Also, the more obvious services like surrendering plates should have their own dedicated line that would allow those people to avoid the triage line (like some post offices have a mail pick-up only line).
Next, just like California, they have this letter-number system that is assigned to you after triage. The damn office has about 25 slots for service. You wait for your combo to be announced. Only they have 10 people manning the 25 slots. Fine, its too expensive to man all 25 slots, then why did the morons who run the DMV the have such a big building made in the first place, were they being optimistic? (Post offices have this same issue btw).
I must give props to the DMV here in NC after I thought they screwed me. My son needed an insurance form but they told me it was out of date. They also told me I could get my agent to fax the form to them and that is what I did. They saved me a repeat trip back to the DMV.
The time to get an appointment in California is fairly long also, due in part, no doubt, to them closing the DMV offices one Friday a month (or is it two) to save money. The problem is that many of the same people screaming and moaning about how long it takes to get an appointment or how slow it is inside the DMV are also screaming and moaning about how high their taxes are, and never make the connection between keeping taxes low and degrading services.
BTW, all the DMV people my wife spoke to when she went last week were friendly and professional also.
There may be cretins on the DMV staff, but I bet they are far outnumbered by the cretins in line.