While the newly introduced Real IDs are certainly clogging up lines at California DMVs, it seems that is not the only issue as there has been a 46 percent rise in customer wait times over the last year.
A "decades-old" computer system could be partly to blame as the department calls it a "40-year-old dinosaur." There has also reportedly been dozens of technology outages in the past 20 months that have disabled operations, sometimes for multiple hours at a time.
DMV Director Jean Shiomoto said in a hearing last week that it would take three years to modernize the old technology and bring its systems into the 21st century.
The DMV's latest solution to the increasingly long wait times has been to ask lawmakers for more money to hire additional workers.
However DMV supervisor Cullen Grant said the problems run deeper than staffing.
“They’re doing all this mass hiring but it’s not fixing the problem,” said Grant.
The Department of Motor Vehicles told the SacBee that it has experienced 34 IT outages since January 2017, ranging anywhere from 15 minutes to nine hours.
Wait times at the DMV are expected to start dropping by mid-September and will return to a more reasonable level by the end of the year.
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