at the dmv -- number problems

So we spent a few hours at the DMV yesterday in order to get state IDs for the kids. Thrills, thrills...

But the fact is, the DMV is not nearly as bad as it used to be. The experience is much improved, but there's still more that can be done. And that's the point of this post.

I remember the olden days. You went to the DMV and started in one long line. When you got to the front of the line you told someone what you wanted to do, and that person directed you to the appropriate line for that action. So you could literally spend hours waiting on line.

There are two big improvements since those days.

The first is that that first line has been replaced with multiple lines, cutting the wait time down -- like a supermarket going from one cashier to several.

The second improvement is that time spent on the second line has been replaced by time spent sitting. At the end of the first line, the clerk gives you a ticket with a letter followed by a number (ours was B362). You sit and wait as codes are called and windows indicated "E481, please go to window 13." The letter prefixes each indicate a certain small set of actions. "B" indicated applying for a new permit, license or ID. "E" indicated returning old license plates, etc.

It's all much better. The one big area that can be improved involves the assigned number ranges. The problem is that numbers are assigned in a Bingo-like way -- each letter has its own range of numbers, presumably to avoid confusion. So, for example, there are only 50 B's -- B325 through B374. When they run out of numbers, they start over again. That would work well on a slow day. But on a crowded day like yesterday, customers (do you call the "customers"? come in faster than they get processed. By the time our number was called, there was already another B362 issued. So at our window the clerk had to compare timestamps to determine who is the real next B362. To make matters worse, it's a two-step process. So after the first clerk performed the first processing of the applications, we had to sit down and wait for our number to get called again to go another window for final processing and payment. By this point there was another B362, so whenever the number was called, we had to converge at the window to find out which one of us was being called.

This could easily be mitigated by increasing the range of B-numbers -- actually by changing all the ranges. Their system has room for three numerical digits after the letter prefix. So everything should start with 000 (e.g., B000) and run through 999. Yeah, there may be some confusion, as they call B051 and have people with C051 and W051 coming to the window. But I think that extra confusion is easier to deal with than having multiple people with the same number all converging on a window.