(Post theme: drivers license by Olivia Rodrigo)
I renewed my driver’s license last week (having turned 45 recently) and it was striking how different the experience was to the other common government-issued identification: a passport. New Zealand’s passport service, Te Mata Uruwhenua, (run by Te Tari Taiwhenua the Department of Internal Affairs) is remarkably efficient – everything from the application process through to delivery is handled extremely well. They promise reasonable process times, and almost always better them.
Last Friday, on the other hand, despite arriving less than 15 minutes after they opened, I had a 30 minute wait for someone to spend less than five minutes reviewing a form, take a photo, and provide an image of a signature.
There are a lot of flaws in the system, such as:
- Why not have the form available online? Presumably someone is going to be entering the relevant details into a digital system anyway. The passport renewal process is entirely digital.
- What benefit is there in requiring physical possession of the expiring license? They have all this data in the system, obviously, so if they wanted to check that I looked like the 10-year-old photo, they have that already. No-one checked my signature. Having the card doesn’t prove identity – I could have picked it up off the street. I didn’t have to go anywhere or show my old passport to renew it. Sadly, an elderly lady in front of me in the queue, who had travelled almost an hour to get there, had forgotten her old license and had to get rejected at the counter.
- Why take the photo there rather than just providing one? That works for passports, where the requirements are much more strict. This could easily be part of the submission process.
- I’m not particularly convinced that the written signature provides much value, but even if it’s needed, this is done on some sort of digital system anyway, so could also easily be done as part of a submission.
- My expiring license was invalidated (it had about 6 weeks left) and replaced with a paper temporary license that lasts for 3 weeks (which will be tight to get the new one in the post, but that’s a separate rural post issue). Why not just leave me with the old one until the new one arrives?
- Why is someone manually checking a form anyway? The address checks were making sure they matched the ones on file (both inaccurate anyway, with the regular address wrongly including the rural delivery number, and the mailing one not matching the form NZ Post likes), which is trivially automated. The other details would similarly be simple to check by a system.
It’s strange to have one service work so well and one so poorly but easily improved. Can’t we just loan some people from Te Mata Uruwhenua to Waka Kotahi NZTA to get things improved?
TonyAndrewMeyer 