DMV’s kiosk a big hit with customers; more to be installed

Cy Ryan and Jace Radke

Friday, Jan. 30, 2004 | 11:11 a.m.

Trying to find a way to cut the wait in line, Alice Milliner hoped to arrive at the Carey Avenue branch of the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles just before closing Thursday.

"I thought if I got here a little before they closed the doors at 5, I'd be able to get my registration renewed in less than an hour," said Milliner, a sixth grade teacher at Dell H. Robison Middle School.

Instead of taking a number and waiting in line, Milliner was in and out of the office in under five minutes, thanks to an electronic kiosk that processes registration renewals in a matter of minutes.

The Carey Avenue office in Las Vegas is the only DMV office in the state that has the kiosk option. It was installed in September as a pilot program. And it has been such a success that more of the kiosks will soon be set up in other DMV offices, officials said Thursday.

The machine is about 6 feet high and 4 feet wide and has a touch screen that allows people to follow a few prompts to complete their registration renewal.

An electronic scanner reads the bar code on the person's registration, and the machine will take cash, credit or debit cards for payment. It then prints a receipt and drops out a new registration tag.

Nevadans -- especially those in the rapidly growing Las Vegas Valley -- consistently complain about how long it takes to get things done at the DMV offices. Waits can last for more a few hours.

The average wait time at the West Flamingo Road office is 78 minutes, with a maximum surpassing four hours. The average wait at the Carey office is 52 minutes and at the Sahara office the average wait is 63 minutes.

Ginny Lewis, director of the DMV, said the said the wait time has decreased at Carey and Sahara and is expected to continue as the department hires more people. The machine could also help.

And after taking a number and waiting in line to be called to a counter, it takes an average of 12 minutes to conduct business with a DMV customer service representative. But the average transaction time at the kiosk is 86 seconds, Lewis said. And kiosks don't need lunch or bathroom breaks so each one can can handle 160 transactions in an eight-hour day.

Those are a few of the reasons the DMV has contracted with JCM America Inc. of Henderson to install 14 more kiosks around the state later this year. There will be two each in the Clark County offices.

Lewis told the Legislative Interim Finance Committee this week that there were 3,028 transactions in the kiosk during the first three months. JCM, the operator of the kiosk, received $22,000 in revenue.

Milliner said Thursday that the kiosk won her over.

"The DMV is usually such a pain, and that's any DMV," Milliner said. "I've lived in other states and you always dread going to the DMV, but this new machine is great.

"It has renewed my faith in the DMV."

Leo Torres also became a kiosk fan Thursday. It took him just over two minutes to get his registration renewed using the machine.

"I came here expecting to wait about two hours," said Torres, who had his 6-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter in tow. "This is the fastest trip to the DMV I've had. I love it."

DMV technician Cassandra Whitney helped customers who had any questions with the machine, but most easily followed the prompts.

"If you can follow directions you can use this," Milliner said. "Some of my students don't follow directions very well, but I think they could probably do this."

Located in the far northwest corner of the branch, technicians guided customers to the machine to save them from standing in line.

"People are sometimes a little scared at first because it's new, but once they use it they love it," Whitney said. "Right now we kind of have to fish for people to come use it."

Harry McCoy was one of the other first-time kiosk users Thursday.

"I wasn't expecting this," McCoy said. "It's just fantastic."

Currently the kiosk allows for registration renewals, and will eventually be programmed to handle late registration of motor vehicles.

Whitney said she had only come across one problem with the machine.

"A couple of times people thought it was an ATM and wondered why there was no money coming out," Whitney said.

McCoy said it was no harder than using an ATM.

But the success of the kiosk was really the only bright spot in Lewis' report to the committee in Carson City on Thursday.

She also told the committee that the state program to allow motorists to renew their registration when they get their car checked for smog emissions annually is off to a slow start. She said there were only two stations in Las Vegas that agreed to enter the program and 10 in Reno.

A person who comes in for the mandatory auto emission check in Clark and Washoe counties would be able to handle the renewal of the registration if the station joined the program. Lewis said there were objections from the service stations that they must take the cash and deposit it with the state agency.

Also, the finance committee agreed to release $555,975 from the reserve account in the department to hire an additional 29 employees to fully staff the West Flamingo Road office of the DMV in Las Vegas.