I'm going to use my municipal utility as the benchmark. It's awesome. I previously was under SCE. After moving, I'm now serviced by my city-owned utility.

They're faster for service, cheaper on rates, don't shut my power off when it's windy, their website is better.

The DMV is always the go-to when people fear government providing a service. Why? Yeah, wait times can be up to a couple hours. But the service I get when I'm called has always been fine. And the only reason I have to appear in person is when I've been lazy about paying registration or getting my smog check.

For 90% of what I want to do, I just use their website on my own time and with no hassle. Or AAA. Or make an appointment at the DMV and wait about 30 minutes.

Complaining about the DMV is like complaining about airline food. Neither of those are really that bad, and I suspect if the money was spent to make them first-class experiences, we'd all just start complaining about the cost instead.

Private sector companies only perform better than the government when they're in a competitive space. As far as I'm concerned, a private monopoly is usually worse than the equivalent government-provided service. (see: Comcast vs. municipal broadband)

PG&E has close to 16 million customers and over 70K square miles, I doubt there's any municipal utility that operates at that scale but I could be wrong.

Could address this by splitting PG&E up into a bunch of smaller scale utilities that are responsive to the needs of their customers, and model them on other successful small-scale utilities.

This could work, would be great to see some case studies of successful municipal run utilities, I'm very open to learn and be corrected.

What’s wrong with the dmv. I just got my real id, made an appointment online, showed up and was out in 15 minutes. Everything I need is automated. My car needs smog so I send in payment and go smog my car. Tabs come in the mail the next week.

In my area the soonest appointment was 6 weeks away at a location that took 45 minutes to reach by car.

Experience is subjective and varies depending on which one you go to, my first interaction was at the Oakland DMV where I had an appointment for the drive test, they got round to me close to 2hrs after my appointment. The DMV in San Francisco has horrendously long lines with very slow processing times.

I once had to deal with <private company> and they made me wait an <exorbitant amount of time> therefore, all private companies are inefficient.

Did I do it right?

Excellent point. I've never waited as long at the DMV as I I do for weekend brunch.

Not really, but whatever works rocks your boat!

Oakland near the Coliseum is the place to go. Quick appointment times, often same day, and they are way friendlier than the Oak Street branch in SF.

It might vary by state? CA DMV around the Bay Area is horrible, but New York is quite pleasant.

First... how can they fuck things up worse than PG&E has? Right now they have unreliable power, dangerous infrastructure, and some of the shittiest rates.

Second: Here in Oregon there are tons of smaller power companies mostly owned by local cities, counties, or non-profits. https://www.oregon.gov/energy/energy-oregon/Pages/Oregon-Uti...

There is very little of the animosity towards these utilities I used to see in California about PG&E. They are run well and keep rates reasonable. I just wish we had a similarly run replacement for Comcast.

Whether California could do something similar, I have no idea. It's pretty surprising how different the culture about this kind of thing is between the two adjacent states. The big issue is item 1 above... PG&E sets an awfully low bar. Maybe if PG&E's management got personally fined when a fire broke out and stopped getting paid when there was a blackout.

> how can they fuck things up worse than PG&E has

All three of these are possibilities:

- more fires

- more days without power

- more expensive

Right but basically every CCE in California has cheaper rates than PG&E. So "more expensive" is very unlikely on power generation. It may be more expensive because PG&E decided to extract all of the cash and neglect maintenance, unlike other California investor-owned utilities (SoCal Edison, SDG&E). But that boat has already sailed.

When I try comparing my LADWP rates to PG&E, they seem pretty "competitive". Are Oregon utilities cheaper because of all the hydro?

Try the military. Or the post office. Or one of the hundreds of municipal power companies, or internet service providers.

The post office is brutally slow!! I've limited my interactions to submitting paper based tax returns when I've done amendments.

The post office is chronically underfunded as a result of hostile federal regulation (mostly put in place by people who want to privatize it and prevent rural customers from getting the low-cost service mandated by law).

So yeah, the post office is a great example: Of what happens when critical services are underfunded.

The post office is also not a traditional federal agency - a directly state-operated power company would have a very different administrative and funding structure.

Its size could lead to that sort of outcome, but if nationalized it could be broken up in the process. There are quite a number of very popular & inexpensive municipal utilities in this country.