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Comment by epa | Hacker News Reader

DMV needs to be outsourced to the auto insurers who earn off of applications. This way we don't end up with 1 location for an entire city.

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Government DMV workers: 'Your paperwork has been denied because you forgot form 12A-T3, you dumb idiot.'

Private DMV run by Google: 'Your paperwork has been denied because our classifier says you're a scammer. We won't tell you why. You are forbidden from ever trying again.'

Exactly, we need to make the government well functioning and competent.

Arizona has "authorized 3rd party" providers who can do 90% what the DMV does. They charge a "convenience fee" but is totally worth it since there is never a line and they are all over the place. It seems to strike a good balance between private/public operations.

https://azdot.gov/motor-vehicles/mvd-hours-and-locations/aut...

Same thing in California. I've been doing my DMV business at AAA for more than a decade.

Is this really a good thing? We're empowering a whole slew of companies to "compete" in an arena simply by the virtue of government's dysfunctional and incompetent services?

What this does is punishes people who cannot pay convenience fees (how much or how little that is orthogonal) and rewards people who can.

This is an extremely sad state of affairs where privatization of something that government is supposed to provide with reasonable quality and timely manner.

This is why our country is compared to third world. Because of shit like this.

I perform DMV functions at my local AAA office because it's more convenient for me. I also think the DMV should provide better service. The two aren't exclusive goals.

its about incentives. The DMV is slow because it has a government enforced monopoly. What's the motivation to be better? At least we have an option. The US isn't different. Its just accepted more readily elsewhere.

Washington State DMV has moved a lot of stuff online. Driver's licenses are renewed every 6 years, you can do that online, so you only have to go to the DMV every 12 years to have a new photo taken and an eye test.

I'm wary of calls to privatize government services, for the obvious rent seeking and erosion of rights that ensues. But this could be a good way to get some innovation in this space. For example, I would love an eink license plate that rotated its contents every few minutes, and could only be linked to my longstanding identity through a database with a cryptographic audit trail.

There are states that have outsourced some DMV operations to private companies. I have lived in one of these places. The results are often not great.

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