(Once, I just waited it out; eventually, they sent me mail saying my license had been reinstated).
Also: I get so much goddamn junk mail that we can barely keep up with paper mail (I try to have the important stuff sent to my office instead). And a lot of municipal and state process gets routed through paper mail, which is my least effective communications mechanism.
This is a huge problem and I really wish more institutions would switch to email/phone services. Mail is incredibly unreliable.
Last year I had a medical bill which I completely missed due to a changing address. It was something I could've easily paid, but I didn't even know it existed until I got a large ding on my credit score.
This seems to imply that financial punishment is the only thing that people will react to, and also that compliance is solely a matter of deterrence. I'd argue both are false. You could easily convert tickets into community service etc. Social shaming has made people "compliant" in all sorts of situations for millennia. Handing out a speeding ticket to someone without considering if they'll be able to pay it (i.e. without considering if the punishment is appropriate TM) is making things worse for no good reason.
Also, how do you sentence someone to community service if you can’t get them to show up in court?
I do get the feeling however that we're making two different comparisons here. You seem to be comparing the "do community service" scenario to "pay a fine" scenario. I am comparing the "pay a fine. oh, you can't? then do community service" scenario to "pay a fine. oh, you can't? then go to jail" scenario.
Granted, that kind of casy by case justice costs time and effort on the side of the state (i.e. tax payer) but personally, that's just the price of having actual "justice for all".
What happens in these cases is that someone doesn't show up to court. A bench warrant is issued, and they get arrested months later when they get pulled over for speeding or something unrelated, and the police find the warrant. At that point, the court can't immediately drop everything and hear the case. They get put in jail for a day or two until a bail hearing, at which point the court will set a new court date, and decide whether to require the person is required to post bail as a guarantee that they'll show up this time, or whether they'll be held in jail pending the court date. At this point, the judge can't order the person to do community service--they've done nothing wrong other than fail to show up to court, and the only reason they're in jail is the risk that they won't show up for the new court date. Many people can't post the bail, so they sit in jail waiting for their new court date.
No matter how lenient you are with debtors, at the end of the day the court needs some way to force someone to participate in the process of deciding what to do. Even if you say "we'll forgive small debts if the debtor is poor," how do you decide that if the debtor won't show up to court?
10 years in prison or 50 hours of community service, however, exact what appears to have the same effect regardless of who is being punished.