The division of state government everyone loves to hate is making news again.
And as I recently engaged in the driver’s license renewal process at the Department of Motor Vehicles, I figured I could jump on the DMV-bashing bandwagon as well.
So, as the cliché goes, with the DMV there is good news and bad news.
Having driven the highways, byways, toll roads and gravel roads of the Golden State for 59 years from Crescent City to Chula Vista north to south and San Simeon to Lee Vining west to east, in retrospect my interaction with the DMV has been relatively limited.
Driving test at 16, followed by a combination of automatic and in-person renewals, the latter more frequent with age. In all, maybe six visits in person.
A few years back the DMV made a bureaucratic Great Leap Forward by adopting the concept of an appointment. For those who chose it, a given time and date replaced the long wait in line a few days before the driver’s license expired. This made my last appointment more manageable when I trekked to Costa Mesa for my 2:20 pm license renewal. In my case, it was time for a new photo, eye test and the dreaded written exam.
It is the written exam—an experience that still strikes terror in the hearts of veteran Californians like me—that has elected officials, newspaper columnists and radio talk show ranters in a froth of outrage.
The essence of all the complaints about the written test is that some questions are “trick questions,” so technical in nature that only someone who has read the Vehicle Code with the intensity of a Bible scholar can answer them.
Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez recently cited the frustration of several Angelos who were tripped up by such questions, including what is the correct way to hold a steering wheel: hands at 9 and 3 or 10 and 2? (answer: 9 and 3). Lopez asked the DMV if such a question didn’t qualify as a trick, and a spokesman told him the question had been removed from the test. Such, however, was not the case for me, as five days after Lopez’s column was printed I took the test, and the offending question was STILL THERE.
My principal gripe with the test—which I took three times before passing—is the inclusion of topics that really have little to nothing to do with actual driving skills. For instance, the question about the amount of alcohol in the blood that is illegal. Frankly, what difference does it make? If I am too drunk to drive I shouldn’t drive. Moreover, do any of us carry a blood alcohol analysis test kit with us? Or the chart with weight/number of drinks?
Similarly, being asked to decide when approaching a slick street, how do I differentiate in real life slowing between 20 miles per hour or 25? Try it yourself the next time you drive and see if you can truly sense what a 5-mph difference will make. Finally, I am not an attorney or judge, so asking me questions about the length of a prison sentence I could serve for a certain infraction is not only absurd, but completely useless and hardly a deterrent unless I’m already on probation.
Here’s my advice to the DMV for such questions.
Use the test as a way to educate. For instance, rather than ask the penalty for leaving a child alone in a car, say something like “leaving a child in a car with the windows closed, even for a short time, can be dangerous, possibly even lethal. Don’t EVER leave a child in a car unattended.”
Or “not stopping for a law enforcement official, or trying to interfere with them, is a crime. It can result in being taken to court and possibly sent to prison.”
Enough griping. The good news is that with an appointment and documentation complete, I finished at the DMV is about an hour, and 10 minutes of that was on me for my multiple test attempts. And my new license arrived just 10 days after I took the test.
See you on the road.
Michael Stockstill lives in Irvine and is retired. He is the author of a book on the history of the Irvine Ranch.
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