I sold a car of mine to Carvana in October. I returned the license plate to the DMV immediately, which is how they're notified that you no longer own the vehicle, waited 7 days, then cancelled my insurance policy on that car. A month later, I got a letter from the DMV that it is a crime to not carry insurance on my vehicle and I will have to reinstate the insurance and pay a $70 fine for letting it lapse. On the car I no longer own, that was now titled in another state and resold by Carvana already.
It took 2 more months and 3 different forms to get the DMV to accept that I no longer owned the car and to stop pursuing me for this "crime".
Sounds like your state has a big problem.
In my state (New York), appointments are generally available within a week and walk-ins are welcome, but those with appointments get priority.
I've never spent more than 30 minutes or so at a NY DMV location and most transactions are available online, including replacement of lost/stolen licenses.
In fact, I decided on Wednesday (11 May 2022) that I wanted to trade in my license for an "Enhanced Driver's License"[0] (EDL) which, among other things, will be required for domestic air travel[1] in a year or so.
That's one of the few transactions that must be done in person. I went online to book an appointment and was presented with a whole bunch of appointment times next week. I chose Thursday (19 May 2022) as it worked best with my schedule, but I could have gone on the 16th if I'd wanted.
So, no. Not all DMVs are a pain or inefficient. Want to make that better in your state? Elect people who will work for you. Just a crazy thought.
Yep. Which is why I said:
...I wanted to trade in my license for an "Enhanced
Driver's License"[0] (EDL) which, *among other things*,
will be required for domestic air travel[1] in a year or
so.
I suppose I could have clarified that the EDL provides RealID and additional functionality as you describe, but I figured that "among other things" and links describing both RealID and EDL, folks could find out for themselves what "among other things" meant.
Perhaps that overestimates the reading comprehension of some folks, but I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt and not assume they're morons.
Perhaps that's a mistake, but if so, it isn't my first and won't be my last.
I thank you for clarifying and I'm sure the morons out there will thank you for your pedantry as well.
I'd further point out that this was just a real-life example of a service which must be provided in person and not online and my experience with scheduling an appointment. It could just as easily have been any of several different services which require actually going to the DMV, but that's the one that is relevant to my life at the moment.
As such, even if I'd claimed that an EDL gets me free blowjobs at Federal buildings, I still made the point I was attempting to make.
Edit: Clarified my prose.
The license plate should follow the car and ownership should be changed online as part of the transaction. It sounds incredibly wasteful that every time a car changes ownership the seller must hand over the plates in person to the DMV. And is there no national registry of cars or data sharing between states? Strange that a car can be registered twice.
If your drivers license is stolen you should be able to just order a new one online and have it delivered in the mail. I have been inside the building of our DMV equivalent two times. One time when I did theoretical exam to be allowed a practical driving test, and once for the driving test. I got a temporary license when I passed and the proper license in the mail the next week. This was 20 years ago.
You can do a lot of stuff electronically in my state, transferring a title isn't one of them.
Additional fun thing is that the buyer is supposed to go do that and it can cause the seller headaches if they don't.
It's not sabotage, it's the fact that the government wants a leash on you. I had an experience in the past with the CA DMV where simply forgetting to "de-register" a broken, non-functional motorcycle resulted in the state levying my bank account for hundreds of dollars in registration fees. The FTB had the money debited right out of my account, no different than if someone committed wire fraud.
If a license is stolen, You need to go into the DMV because they'll have to take a new photo. There was a temporary exception due to COVID, but I think that's no longer available since I had to go into the office when my license expired.
There's too many personalized plates and other exceptions in the US to make that viable.
We bought our last family car from enterprise and one day this family walked by while my mom was waiting for me in the store parking lot. The kid recognized our car as a rental they had on a road trip once and got excited about it. Awkward. xD
Custom plates are weird. You can either give them to the new owner or transfer them to another vehicle or return them to the DMV.
This whole "turn in the plates or we'll go after you for not having insurance" seems completely insane. I've never turned in plates and no one's cared.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/vehicle-industry-regi...
Some plates have retention fees, some don't. YMMV.
Now I do chose the office to visit with some care, and also (as an "elite WFH software engineer") time it so that the lines are likely to be shorter, so YMMV.
Rather, there's an online form for notifying them of a sale.
If they have a better mousetrap, good for them. If they don’t and are just overpaying for cars, well, good for me.
In California the DMV experience was greatly improved by having appointments, and for walk in, you get a number and at least have an idea when you'll be called, so you can sit in a waiting area, not have to stand for hours.
COVID has reduced staffing so that makes appointments harder to get.
Also, imagining that corporate offices are models of efficiency is an error.
Absolutely!
I used to work for a Fortune 50 company (that shall remain nameless here) and was moving various groups (mostly marketing and research) away from mainframe batch processing (this was the mid 1990s) toward distributed (Unix) systems.
The inefficiency and waste were just unbelievable. The corporation had tried to move their customer service reps off IBM 3270[0] terminals which were locked in to a single application (with significant retraining required for different apps) with X terminals (what they used to call thin clients) that scraped database queries and stored them in a local database and had a unified UI across all apps.
The app was complete, the roll out team purchased ~USD$300,000,000 worth of systems and infrastructure, and then realized that it would cost USD$150,000,000/year to support/maintain the environment.
So the project was canceled, with hundreds of millions of dollars in Unix boxen and related hardware sitting in warehouses, now without a clear purpose.
When moving folks off of the mainframe, we always pushed them to use the hardware already purchased (a sunk cost). All a group needed to to was put the capital depreciation for whatever equipment they used on their budget lines.
The vendor (again who will remain nameless) priced out equipment (on purpose, I'm sure) so it was cheaper (on the budget line) than the depreciation on the equipment the corporation already owned. In every single case, these groups chose to spend real money buying new equipment rather than taking on the depreciation of the equipment already purchased.
What's more, when evangelizing these changes, I was strongly cautioned to never use the phrase "increased productivity," as that (apparently) made the heads of these groups concerned about losing head count.
tl;dr: The corporation was so fractured and inefficient that group heads would waste corporate dollars in the millions just to maintain their budget and headcount.
I'd love to hear about something like that happening at the DMV or other government office. But I won't, because if folks in the public sector pulled shit like that, they'd be hounded out of their departments.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270
Edit: Added the missing link.
That’s a single program. Forget it, Jack. It’s China Town.
On a per-project percentage basis, the parent's story wasted ~100% of the project's budget. The same number for California's unemployment fraud is less than 2% (the program totaled about $110B).
$300M was wasted in an organization that serves (completely spitballing here) maybe ~500k people among all its customer organizations? The California government serves ~40M California residents.
In any case, government waste is likely orders of magnitude more easily uncovered than even public companies' waste. And when we find out, we can lobby for change and vote for policies that adjust the process to hopefully result in less waste.
But when Coca-Cola overpays 10x for some highly-connected contracting firm to build them some shoddy CRUD software for an internal process we'll probably never heard about it due to a combination of lack of transparency and lack of reporting interest. If we do hear about it, there is no real avenue for lobbying for the change of Coca-Cola policy.
That's not even mentioning that Coca-Cola's entire existence could be (rightfully, in my mind) considered corporate waste because their products actively harm the world, which is a claim much more difficult to apply to the DMV or the California government as a whole.
That's more or less the business model for some consulting companies.
Eventually it was sorted out but at considerable human cost. As of Jan 1 2021 something like 1.5 million claimants had their benefits stopped until they had shown proof of identity. It took months to get it all straightened out, especially for people who didn't have drivers licenses, for example.
At the end of the year the department's surplus went to a general fund (and I think this was also a factor in deciding future budget allocations for the department).
So everyone in his department was incentivized to buy equipment they didn't actually need so that they didn't "lose" their money.
The old, perfectly working, hardware would be put out into hallways and get thrown away in the trash.
Granted a public university is a lot different from an actual government department.
It's totally baffling to me when there's 'the DMV' in US films/tv, because that's just not a place (nor anything equivalent) we have to go to, whether it's 'only fifteen minutes' or more.
(Sure, when my driving licence expires in 10y, or I change address, I'll need to spend a minute or so on an online form.)
I've had other interactions with state/local government services over the past couple years, and they've all been pretty bad. It's like anything else: there are helpful, compassionate people you occasionally speak with, but it's easy to get buried in the complexity and ridiculous inefficacy.
Federal (and state for that matter) tax returns are a good example. Something that every citizen of working age technically has to deal with are incredibly complex.
Things have not improved, to say the least.
Move to New York. I recommend NYC, as the food is fabulous.
Looking forward to having you as a neighbor!
The problem with the above is it weakens democratic institutions by removing the exercise of power from the people the population select to lead.
Inefficiency to me can not possibly be more clearly demonstrated than by ape pictures losing hundreds of thousands of dollars for their purchasers. But we also have examples like Uber spending cash on hand to drive competitors under without having a plan to maintain their own services without heavy subsidy.