We’re going to start our journey down the DMV’s variation on the River Styx with what is arguably the ugliest part of the experience: trying to actually secure an appointment through the online system that is supposed to make visiting the DMV driver licence office easier with less waiting.
Because the first REAL ID application must be made in person due to having to present additional identifying documents which are physically scanned into the ID record and visually verified by the licence examiner, one would ordinarily use NC DMV’s online application to select the type of appointment needed, which DMV driving licence office we wanted to go to, and pick an available appointment time.
Sounds easy, right?
The problem is that the NC DMV online appointment system as it is currently implemented is utterly useless and not at all fit for purpose.
First and foremost, the only time I saw appointments less than three months away was the first day I looked whilst waiting for Katie to get in the Traverse after school. I found two of them about a month away at the Cary office (not particularly convenient) and was in the process of snagging one when she arrived. I should have finished grabbing that appointment at that time and dealt with the massive traffic jam coming out of her school because five minutes later when we arrived at the park she trains for lacrosse…those appointments were already gone. And after visiting their application at least 50 times in the next couple of days, no office within 100 miles of Raleigh had any availability before late February.
The website says that appointments do open up from time to time but you’ve got a better chance of being struck by a wayward lightning bolt as to luck into getting an appointment earlier than three months or more from the date of your search.
However, by law, the Driver’s Eligibility Certificate showing valid school enrollment and sufficiently good grades required for a teenager to get their provisional permit or licence expires 30 days after it is issued by the school meaning that if we gave up and just accepted the appointments being offered, the chances we’d be able to secure one before the document expires and having to go back through the amazingly fun process of getting that certificate in hand is next to nil.
I understand the intent of the law is to try to ensure that DMV does not unwittingly issue a valid permit or licence to someone who drops out or whose marks in school takes a nosedive off a cliff after the certificate is issued but not having sufficient resources available so that the vast majority of those students seeking driving privileges have a better than average chance of securing them with the first eligibility certificate is a bit daft.
To be honest, with most of the school systems in North Carolina having some sort of computerised student information and transcript system that’s updated near constantly, it can’t be that hard to have some sort of interoperable eligibility clearing house so that DMV can check in near real time when the student applies for driving privileges that their school and their grades are in order and eliminate the need for the paper certificate entirely.
Would it eliminate any chance of a kid getting a licence/permit that they are not entitled to? Not in the slightest…just as the paper document doesn’t completely eliminate that possibility either. The only advantage to the paper document is that there’s a named school official who could theoretically be held accountable when the authorities discover that the student has lost their academic eligibility.
The design is also breathtakingly stupid in this age of browsers having access to reasonably accurate location data. So instead of polling each office individually and hoping for the best and in the process generating many more database and web server requests, wouldn’t it make a hell of a lot more sense to select the type of appointment and some sense of the location of the person making the query (whether it’s automatic through location services or the user entering a ZIP code and search radius) and the system could offer up the best available appointments for the offices within that geographic area available at that time? Then the user could quickly pick an appointment time/office from a list and be done with it.
It wouldn’t be particularly difficult to implement as most modern relational databases have options for geospatial queries and would likely dramatically improve the performance of the underlying system. If the NC DMV happens to stumble across this rant masquerading as a BLOG post, feel free to contact me. I’m pretty sure my 30+ years as a programmer/database weenie would be up to the job… 😉
With the “do this the way NC DMV would hope we’d do it with an appointment option” no longer a realistic choice, we’re now left with turning up at a licence office and waiting for our turn amongst the people lucky enough to get an appointment three months prior.
This was what was actually suggested by Katie’s behind-the-wheel instructor (unofficially, of course!) and that advice was well taken!