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Dmv.org

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158 pointstodsacerdoti74 comments

The privatized "DMV"s in Missourri are amazing. You have a question? Call your local "License Office" and you don't have to go through a robo call router, it rings and a person picks up. Go into the office and you get served almost immediately (depending on volume/time/location). In MO, vehicle registration is every second year (even year cars in even years, odd in odd). I am in every y ear for one vehicle or another. Last year I registered three cars in under five minutes. No papers to fill out, just showed them my tax invoice, my insurance card, and my inspection cards. They checked a few boxes, and told me to have a nice day.

Yep in Maryland we have "Tag & Title" places - they don't offer all the services of the MVA (our name for the DMV), but for what they do offer the fee is generally well worth it.

> our name for the DMV

...because of course "DMV" stands for "D.C., Maryland, Virginia" there :)

Amazing you say? I have the opposite opinion and think they're quite trash. The ones I visit almost always have a long wait, multiple display TVs with non-stop advertising on them, the employees are frequently cantankerous, and being a for-profit entity, the amenities are always as sparse as possible or in need of repair.

Overall a rather soul-sucking example of a captive market optimizing for profit.

Also have the same experience with MO DMVs being slow like DMVs commonly are. I think being for profit also makes the quality of the locations inconsistent [1] and that is mostly due to no state funding.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ozarksfirst.com/news/why-so...

For most common purposes the CA DMV experience has really improved. Most things can be done online quite easily and they actually have a decent website

Yea they have made great strides here. I have only had to go a single time in the past ~8 years and that was to provide documentation for the Real ID.

For additional anecdata, I've had the same experience at the government-run Indiana BMV, and most recently, was able to go in and renew my plates from a kiosk in the lobby without waiting or talking to a human at all. When my wife changed her name and renewed her plates, the whole process took about 10 minutes, including sitting and waiting to talk to one of the 20 or so humans working there.

TX here. I don’t know the last time I went to the DMV. Everything and I mean everything can be done online

The last time I had to go into a DMV in TX was when I had let a motorcycle's registration lapse >1yr. It took going in-person to show some documents (I think the title?) to get it re-registered.

Other than that, for someone who already has their vehicle properly registered and they don't need a new photo for the DL, yeah you never really need to go in.

Also, last time I went in, they offered a text message queue system. Sign up online ahead of time, pick a rough time slot, they text you when you're ~10 minutes and then ~5 minutes until your number, then when you get in your number is one of the next ones up. I spent maybe five minutes total in there.

EDIT: Thinking back on that, it wasn't the DMV that I had to go to for that lapsed registration. It was the county tax office. So yeah, haven't been to a DMV in many years.

TX here too. My 16-yo just got his learner's permit and that can't be done online. Many locations don't have available appointments for months. Some, such as in SE Texas, have same day appointments. We ended up driving over an hour away to get a same-week appointment.

Months-long wait times are just obscene.

I don't know if this is possible for your use case in TX but my local DMV in OR has a months-long wait for a REAL ID appointment. Or, you can walk in and get it done in about 30 minutes most days. I guess they only have one or two people fully trained to process the applications but similar to getting into a doctor's office when you have an urgent need, they can usually squeeze you in even without an appointment.

CA dmv, practically everything can be done online and through the mail; people love to complain about the lines and how everything is slow but I sincerely don't know what they expect: even when I had to go to the office I always made an appointment, got called in within 10 minutes of arriving, handled whatever I needed to handle expeditiously, and was on my way, and had this same experience in various locations. None of this "I stood in line for a zillion hours, in the sun, snowing, both ways..." nonsense.

Lots of things can be done online in Indiana. Plate renewal is one of them.

Initial vehicle registration isn't if you didn't buy from a dealer and need a title.

One you are logged into the BMV site, they now have realtime chat that is prompt and helpful. When I do need to go in, I use that to make sure I have everything I need.

Oklahoma has a similar system where you can register your vehicle or renew (not acquire) your license at a "tag agent", except they stopped calling them that a few years ago. I think the benefit of this arrangement is separation of concerns between normal citizens and the dregs of society. You see, in a state where you do all things at the state DMV office, normal functional people have to intermingle with alcoholics and ex-felons and other dysfunctional residents who are massively overrepresented. In Oklahoma only people in good standing are found at the tag agency, while felons and people trying to resolve their 37th DUI arrest are found only at the DMV. That makes it feel like a more efficient system, for the normal people.

I have a similar experience in my state, but almost none of it is privatized. They made it so you can do most of what you need to online, like renewing your vehicle registration or driver's license. They also extricated all driver's license management from the DMV and put it under it's own Driver's License Division. When I have had to go in-person for either of these things, lines haven't been long and the staff have been very helpful.

I kind of wish that the DMV was combined with an attached food court... I mean, that way you can come on your meal break, actually get something to eat while waiting etc.

> vehicle registration is every second year

For those of us not in the US, can you explain what this means? And why it necessitates a physical visit to an office?

I have owned vehicles in the UK and Norway for fifty years and never had to visit such a place for the purpose of registering a vehicle. Even before it was done online all that was needed to register change of ownership was to send in the registration document. And we don't have to do it again. We have to pay an annual fee to the roads authority but that is now collected by the insurance company automatically in Norway so it cost money but not time or effort.

Like so many things, it varies by state. Where I live, the only reason I've had to physically go into the DMV in years, is to get a new license (they have to take a photo and capture a signature). Otherwise, it's just fill out a form online and they send me an updated registration in a week or so.

Is the tag tied the tag to the car there?

In most US states, the tag is registered to the owner and the car. I put old cars on/off the road and have 3-8 tags/yr come and go (+3 on daily drivers).

While the tag is in your possession, insurance must be kept active on that vehicle. If you pull a car off the road, you have to turn in the tag before canceling insurance.

Like lots of people, I've had my license auto-suspended for non-insurance. My company notified the state of renewal (old end+new begin) and state only recorded the old policy ending. I only found out because I routinely checked my license status online. Saved me a trip to jail and an impounded vehicle.

Its varies by state. In MO I can theoretically do it online, but I can't get through the ID verification step. I have to go to town to get my car inspected, so it's only an extra five or ten minutes to stop off at the License Office. If the experience was poor I'd work harder to get the online registration working, but it's so easy I don't see the point.

Interesting, dmv.org is owned by Raj Lahoti. I used to work for Dave Lahoti when I was beginning my career and was desperate for money, he was the quintessential domain squatter (I eventually ran the first chance I had). Turns out they're related. Infact there's 3 of them, and they're all in the game of domain squatting and SEO.

Why we never developed a vacant land/land value tax on parked domain names has always been a mystery to me — speculation through domain name squatting (and, to a more extreme degree, cyber-squatting) has always left a bad taste in my mouth.

Land value taxes pressure you to make money out of land, of GTFO and yield it to someone who can make enough money to offset the tax. This should work great in dense city downtowns, for instance.

The early internet was pretty non-commercial, and a lot of valuable domain names were taken by projects that do something useful or cute, but cannot generate any serious money, or any at all. An introduction of an LVT equivalent would unsettle all these small projects.

Another question is how to compute the value. I see only one non-arbitrary approach: to auction off every domain every year; the sum paid would be the tax. Cybersquatters would win many such auctions, but of course only for domains they think will be in demand soon.

Another question why dmv.org should in any way be related to DMV; I'd expect it to be DMV.gov because it's a governmental agency. You can't squat a .gov domain.

you and I can't, but I bet there NOC at .gov has some stories to tell.

It's very American to have government services so bad that there's a sapsucking layer of private companies profiteering from being confused with the government.

I'd appreciated it if you named us a country with highly efficient, fast government services.

(For bonus points, a European country.)

I've been pretty satisfied with the Netherlands as an American who moved here a couple years ago from Texas. Especially local government, things get done on time, when they say they are going to. I filed my taxes super early (by Dutch standards) and got my finalized copies in a couple of months. New IDs take days to process if you're already in the system. In all my interactions with the government to immigrate, everything was on time and efficient.

My only gripe is that you have to go to some larger cities for some services which requires travel or potentially taking time off, but that's not really a problem when your entire country is accessible by rail/car in less than 3 hours. And these are specific expat services, not every day stuff.

Pick any low-corruption high-democracy happy country and that's what you'll see. Nordics pretty much all qualify.

https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2023

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index#...

https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/happiest-countries-in-the...

Norway.

Many public services used to be great. Then private companies spent decades lobbying to have their funding cut or hamstring them in some other way so they could come in and privatize the market.

The USPS is probably the last good functioning service and Trump made huge budget cuts to try the same thing with that.

> Florida, third most populous state, actually has a DHSMV or FLHSMV depending on where you look... but their online services portal is branded MyDMV, even though there is no state agency or division called the DMV. See how this can be confusing?

The full name is "Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles" -- DHSMV and FLHSMV are two different ways of abbreviating that.

MyDMV is the name of the new web portal the state recently released, which I believe is a third-party application running on top of Salesforce. So that's just the name of the software, not of any official state agency. The previous web portal, which IIRC was a custom standalone application, had a different name.

And it's worth noting that they made a horrible botch job of data migration during the rollout of the new MyDMV portal, and huge numbers of users were left unable to authenticate -- when attempting to log in, they're told to visit their local driver's license office instead. Unfortunately, local driver's license offices are administered by the counties in Florida, and work directly with FLHSMV's underlying databases, so have no ability to correct access issues with the web portal. The whole thing is an absolute trainwreck.

Georgia had an appallingly bad DMV in the 90s and fixing was a focus of Governor Sonny Perdue's gubernatorial race. Between 2003-2011 it was overhauled and when Nathan Deal was governor from 2011-2019 it was boosted further.

They had kiosk you could go to that would fulfill most of your needs and you could schedule appointments online. It was fantastic.

Then Brian Kemp came into office, cut the budget, and screwed it all up. I wouldn't at all be surprised if it had something to do with business interests in the state.

There's a strong privatized driver training and rehabilitation lobby in the state. Many traffic courts in the state refer you to these private companies as part of the resolution to tickets.

He's wrong about TX though. There is a DMV but don't go there for a license plate nor a driver's license. You need to go to two different places for those, your local tax office for license plates in the county you are registered... And the dept of public safety for drivers license. Oh, and you have to do that IN your county.

I have gotten a new photo and replacement drivers license from a DPS in a different county in TX as recently as one month ago.

Interesting.

I was given a ticket driving through Texas recently, and the cop told me if I went to a grocery store (he pointed to one off the freeway), that there was a video kiosk there. That kiosk had a judge or what not waiting, and I could get an instant trial for the ticket.

I have to admit, that part of it is efficient.

I didn't bother, and just paid it online later, but still... neat.

Tax office has to be in your county yes, which makes sense because you're registering your vehicle with the county you live in so it has to be one of their tax offices, but you can go to any DPS for drivers license stuff. We regularly use a specific DPS office in the next county over that's in small town about an hour away, and so much quicker to get things done there even accounting for the extra time driving out there.

> dmv.org lived by Google and, it seems, it will die by Google. Several SEO blogs report that, sometime in 2019, Google seems to have applied aggressive manual adjustments to a list of government-agency-like domain names that include irs.com (its whole own story) and dmv.org. Their search traffic almost instantaneously dropped by 80%.

lol, that's funny and ironic.

Honestly, I think it's because they are competing with google ITSELF.

Google has gotten to the point that it is intricately interwoven into the official websites, like www.dmv.ca.gov and www.ftb.ca.gov and www.irs.gov

google wants you to go to the real government websites and it gets the data.

I’m as happy to trash google as anyone else here, but we must admit that providing the government site when somebody searches dmv or irs the right thing to do. Should these government sites be using google? No. But regardless, Google should put them first.

That depends. Does the government website have the answer to the question in the query? Often it does not.

Here in the UK, we have a problem of disreputable businesses - I'm not sure that they're actually illegal - charging fees for government services

They aren't really providing a service, but they're getting between confused people and public services

Consumer finance journalists complain a lot about their sites appearing before the real thing in search results

We have this in the US. Open a business and you'll get spammed with a lot of providers offering stuff that is either free, un needed, or overpriced.

"You need this sign in your break room else you'll be fined $10,000! Just subscribe for $299/year and we'll mail you labor posters each year." These can be found for like $10 and don't change yearly.

"This form needs to be filed else you'll be fined! Pay us $499 and we'll take care of it!" Free to file online.

Even forming a business in my state is like 2 forms and $125 and can be done all online. But if you were to google how to, you'd find all these people to "Help out" and it'd end up costing you $1000-2000 for their "Help".

As they say, a fool and his money are soon parted, and there are many that would like to facilitate this process...

I don't think society should treat "Stupidity Arbitrage" as an acceptable business model. These guys are predators, exactly like scammers that call up elderly people and try to get them to buy gift cards. We should have a clearly defined regulatory framework to get rid of them.

As long as a free market exists, there will still be a stupid tax. That's just what happens when you let people sell other people stuff through marketing and advertising, you fill the gap between "expected utility" and "realized value" with lies. White lies, not like "our product will fly you to the moon" but unrealistic stuff like "the Humane AI pin will read you recipes while you cook!" The Humane pin will be dead in a drawer in 6 weeks; the people selling that know full-well they don't have market fit.

The worse practice IMO is exploiting a captive audience. It doesn't matter how stupid you are if you're an Apple developer or an Oracle customer; these companies will bleed you dry for simply touching their product. The only path of recourse is antitrust settlement, which is a lengthy and unnecessary process that is inherently stacked in the favor of whoever can hire more lawyers. Because of this, companies have no motivation to improve a paid product. Instead, the goal is to make you reliant on it somehow and then increase the price. We see this in Netflix, Amazon Prime, Windows/Office365/OneDrive, Apple developer program/Apple One/iCloud/App Store, and YouTube's TV/subscription services. The most successful businesses in our daily lives are the ones that have dug their claws into us and refuse to be anything other than a parasite.

How do you diffentiate stupidity arbitrage from lazy arbitrage though? Food delivery is super convenient.

I don't know how reliably you can distinguish between stupidity arbitrage and lazy arbitrage, and there might be grey areas, but if it's actually more convenient it's probably lazy arbitrage and if it's easily confused with a service it's reselling it's probably stupidity arbitrage

I'd like to distinguish between those that bring services closer to customers and those that hinder customers getting to the services they intend to use

To be fair a lot of people are not privy to the “correct” way to open a business. You should not list your name on any public facing documents nor should you use your personal address anywhere. It helps to consult a lawyer when starting up.

I always tell people to expect a minimum of $1k/yr to maintain a business and that’s to pay for a registered agent, a virtual office, and a domain and website (I also recommend a CPA). A registered agent exists only to forward legal correspondence directly to the owner. A virtual office handles all of the mail (which includes the junk mail you mention but can be silently processed out using their virtual mailbox service). And a website to provide an easy means of communication (again with spam filters in place)

I never see junk mail and I have started 5 successful businesses over the past 20 years. Spam phone calls is a completely separate unsolved problem, however

The moment you allow someone to rank above a government site for something the government site should do, you create the incentive to profit from that position. Answering a question is probably harmless, but scrolling an extra 300 pixels is also harmless. At worst, consumers get scammed into paying for services they are entitled to for free (with a worse quality of service). Sometimes hundreds or thousands of dollars. It's not hypothetical, it's already happening.

> That depends. Does the government website have the answer to the question in the query?

Dodgy site that appears so correct you enter your private info < legit gov portal.

True even if gov site could be better designed.

> Often it does not.

Then we need to fix that problem, not make it OK for it to exist. A government site should be the source of truth on information about governmental affairs, or relevant to this article, if I search for "$STATE DMV", I should end up there first. If I search "how do I register my car in $STATE", that answer should also come from a governmental site.

Every time I search up a DMV question I get a DMV FAQ link that answers my question. Nine out of ten times when researching a tax question (I do my own taxes) I get a link to the IRS or the franchise tax board for my state with the specific directions I need.

When I'm searching for in for that the ultimate answer is coming from a government entity, usually it's because I want authoritative information, and I'm not willing to rely on a third party hopefully getting it right.

The only thing I want from Google when making these searches is to deep link me into the appropriate section of the official site. The only reason I'll visit a third party site is if I don't have a good official link and I'm hoping to get a clue to refine my search by reading specific laws or statute id's they might reference, since I'm not going to make tax filing decisions or assume directions given regarding a DMV process are correct from some random online website.

I think I disagree actually, if I’m looking for info from a government agency I would rather see the absence of information on the government site, and explore from there. Possible see why I misunderstood the what regulations I have to follow or how I misunderstood what services the government provides. That’s much better than somebody’s (even well intended) best guess or interpretation.

> Google has gotten to the point that it is intricately interwoven into the official websites, like www.dmv.ca.gov and www.ftb.ca.gov and www.irs.gov

Could you elaborate on what you mean by this? I visited dmv.ca.gov and nothing stood out to me?

It uses Google Analytics, loads a bunch of Youtube videos on the front page, loads static files from Google etc.

Now we just need Google to give websites like w3cschools and geeksforgeeks a lower rank, and give python.org, go.dev, MDN, w3.org higher rank.

I was recently surprised how bad Google results had gotten. Way back when I used Python heavily a google search would return results from python.org. When my kids were learning python for uni I told them the python online docs were great, but my daughter disagreed. I asked her to show me what she meant and she showed me her google search - the first page of links contained no hits for python.org results. She thought python online docs were crap like geeksforgeeks. It was one of those moments when you realize the world has changed around you since the last time you looked.

I've always been a critic of the algorithm over curation for search. Cheap low effort content has always been orders of magnitude easier to generate than real quality content. The only way to prevent declines of the real content is to put a wall(curation) around serious information providers so they cannot be gamified out of the way by bad actors.

Embracing Googles "battle it out" style of search results has been a net harm to the quality of searching for information.

If the world stuck with the slower but ultimately finite method of curating quality providers we would have an amazing set of resources instead of spam blogs.

At least with Kagi you can manually adjust the ranking of certain domains

I actually love w3schools as a quick reference or to use their sandbox to test something out

DMV.org's hq ~~is~~ used to be in Encinitas, CA. I used to walk by it when I lived there.

Well, looks like it was taken over by Sunbum, maybe around 2018? Here's a Google Maps street view image for proof:

https://www.google.com/maps/@33.0473569,-117.2949843,3a,75y,...

He's not wrong about FL. There are state and municipal DMV sites. It can be years between site visits (renew:2years and later automatic and then later by mail).

That's long enough to not know if official domains have changed and/or not be familiar with the new copycats that sprung up. Given the median age can be death in places, the copycats may do a brisk business.

We moved to a new county. We found 2 sites that could auto-fill our info from state databases - because the state sells it. Neither were .gov domains, might even have been able to perform the needed service. Or maybe not.

We ultimately opted to visit. The walk-in location is quick and competent.

UK counterpart: Driver And Vehicle Licensing Agency. DVLA. Based in Swansea, Wales. Instead of having local offices you deal with them through the post office or online.

They really are good as well. I insure my car and the DVLA knows about it. I MOT my car and the DVLA knows about it. Then I hop online and pay £0 to tax my car as it is a low emission vehicle.

I used to have to collect all my certificates and physically present them at the PO, but not any more.

Making the surveillance database state work for you!

(I'm joking, but this is actually how it should work. The Americans get in such a tangle due to fighting "the state" in the wrong places)

Privatized DMVs in Ohio were the absolute best DMVs to go to. Actually, I'm pretty sure they called them BMVs, but still, the private ones were great.

The public DMVs in Ohio wern't too bad, but there was a clear lack of motivation to move customers through the process. Once I got to a state which had no private DMVs....thats when I saw the real horror :(

I was somewhat surprised to not see Michigan mentioned as a "weirdo" in DMV-land. Our DMV-like responsibilities are handled by Secretary of State branch offices. Really, that seems to be _almost_ all that they do, and they do it will all of the enthusiasm and efficiency you would expect from a government agency.

> Of These Fifty United States plus six territories, I count 28 DMVs, 5 MVDs, 5 BMVs, 2 OMVs, 2 "Driver Services," and the remainder are hard to describe succinctly.

In Massachusetts it's the RMV, The Registry of Motor Vehicles.

If I remember correctly, during it's hayday DMV.org was making upwards of a million dollars a month. Crazy how times have changed and titans fall.

I'm getting a 403 trying to access this page.

We live in a country of Majority rule. Not sure why you think it's surprising that the common parlance is DMV. Dig deeper.

>We live in a country of Majority rule

Which one would that be? There are 195 countries in the world, and as with most online forums, HN is open (presumably) nearly all of them.

Which country do you live in?

The US is not majority rule, assume you're talking about the US. Between Gerrymandering and the First Past the Post system, it's really not that uncommon for minority rule. The easiest example of that being the 2016 Presidential election, where Trump lost the popular vote by just over 2%.

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