Bad parking, nonexistent staff, insufficient helpful signage, no help on the automatic kiosks, and the usual miasma of subtle, bureaucratic despair*. I give the various motor vehicle agencies credit: customer service, when you can actually find a human being, has improved. But the workers clearly don’t want to be there any more than I did. Hell, I could at least leave. Eventually… after the above conditions all conspired to turn a five minute errand into a sixty minute chore.
…I don’t even need to say it at this point, do I? I don’t have to: you already know the point. Left, Right, Beyond Pluto: you can follow the political analogy in your sleep by now. That’s prime agitprop right there: prime. Also completely true, but then nobody ever said that propaganda had to be a lie.
Moe Lane
*Also, a rainstorm and an easily-bored small child; but neither are actually the MVA’s fault, so it’s unfair to score them against the agency.
I give the Michigan Secretary of State a lot of credit. They’ve been working hard over the last few years to move most mundane tasks to online so you don’t have to physically go to the office. The offices are generally well-staffed and have nights where they are open late. The SOS has been an R for a long time now (even when we had a D Governor).
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In the last election, the D that was running had a platform that included closing most offices and consolidating into a few mega offices in metropolitan areas, then offering ‘move to the front of the line’ service to various groups. Sure, we like to talk about how leftists create artificial shortages (decent service, in this case) and then act like heroes by giving basic things that everyone had before back to a few, but here it was right in front of me and I was dumbfounded by it.(thankfully the guy lost by a wide margin).
Jesse White (Illinois SecState) went to great lengths to improve the DMV in white suburbia .. Jesse is a Dem, not white, and his first statewide win wasn’t based on suburbia … but he figured out early that if he wanted to keep the job, he needed to fix it so his most likely competitors had no traction.
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The offices aren’t great, they’re loud and the lines can get long, but fewer of the staff are active-hostile, and there are more staff, so .. it works okay. Jesse also instituted certain “pay for faster service” options – Need that paperwork pushed through faster? Pay an extra $$ and we’ll do it.”
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If more Illinois Dems were like Jesse .. I may have stayed.
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I do have to give him a little grief over the official SecState web site .. http://www.CyberDriveIllinois.com .. the *site* is reasonably navigable, but the URL is .. awful!
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The Washington State DMV, on the other paw, is … I’ve been in libraries that are louder, the lines are almost nonexistent, the staff are reserved but friendly and seem to want to help, and .. they have a *lot* of “micro-offices” – two or three guys in a strip mall – spread around.
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Of the two, WA wins, paws down… Jesse should take note.
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Mew
In PA the vast majority of things can be done online – registration renewals, fine and fee paying, address and name changes, title history searches on an oddly efficient and well designed site.
Oddly efficient for something operated by the government that is.
In California one joins the auto club not for the free maps (who still uses those? come on), but because they have nice helpful people who can do most DMV transactions in their pleasant offices with a minimal wait. Don’t tell anyone, they will all want some.
The real state DMV now has multi-hour lines since they stopped being interested in whether folks were in the country legally.
This spring I had to go to the Michigan SoS office, brought the iPad so I could read.
Got there, took a number, took a seat, turned the iPad on, did not even get to the reading app when my number was called.
Transferred title, transferred my old plates to the new bike.
Was in and out of the office in less than 15 minutes.
That is the way a govt. office should work.