Not sure what I think about this.
With a $63 million infusion from the Legislature, state officials hope to cut the legendary long lines and irritating red tape at driver’s license centers across Texas with upgraded technology and new “megacenters” in Austin and three other metro areas.
Texas Department of Public Safety officials on Tuesday provided the first peek at their plans for the expedited new system: $600,000 will be spent to “refresh” existing centers, credit cards will be accepted at all locations, online payments will be allowed, and new uniforms will be given to all employees.
“The goal is to do driver license renewals in 30 minutes,” said Rebecca Davio, a DPS assistant director in charge of the driver’s license division. “We’re also looking to schedule driving tests online.”
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With $63 million in additional funds, Davio said the division in the coming year will hire more than 360 employees, pay current employees more, purchase new equipment and install $3 million worth of new technology .
The following year, she said, six megacenters will be operational and $3 million worth of additional new technology will be installed to complete a plan she said is designed to “transform the driver license experience statewide.”
The Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth areas each will have two megacenters — licensing offices designed to handle large volumes of business, instead of the smaller centers that DPS has historically operated. Those areas have been plagued by customer complaints for years.
One megacenter will open in Austin and another in San Antonio.
A year ago, DPS initiated a successful pilot program, starting in Austin, to cut the wait times with express lanes for shorter transactions and appointments made online, among other changes.
One of the megacenters already is open in Houston, but locations for the other centers, which will be leased, have not yet been determined, Davio said.
Some changes already have started to take effect, and they should reduce the licensing wait: Card delivery times have been shortened to under 10 days, and queuing systems (electronic take-a-number systems) have been installed at the agency’s 59 busiest offices to speed up the process for waiting customers.
I’m pretty sure they had a take-a-number thing at the DPS office where I got my first Texas driver’s license over 20 years ago, so I’m not really clear on how that will help. In my experience, what makes the process take so long is that there’s such a high customer volume. The only way to fix that is with more employees. I guess that’s part of the plan to “transform the driver license experience”, but there are no specifics about customers per hour and employees per customer, so who knows. A lot of the rest sounds like fluff – uniforms? really? – and stuff that probably should have been done a long time ago, like scheduling driving tests online. But maybe I’m being overly cynical. Anyone been to that pilot location in Austin? Let us know what it was like.