(The Center Square) – Better days and shorter lines are promised by the new leader of North Carolina’s highly criticized drivers license program.
David Tine appeared Thursday at a lengthy joint Transportation Oversight Committee meeting in Raleigh.
Total average wait times at driver’s license offices have dropped from two hours and 11 minutes in July to 79 minutes, Tine said. Wait times once customers get inside the driver’s license office as opposed to outside have dropped from 57 minutes to 28 minutes, said the former legislator who took over six months ago as commissioner of the state Department of Motor Vehicles.
“It’s been a very busy six months,” Tine said.
The agency is trying to reduce demand at driver’s license offices by making more services available online while at the same time expanding the capacity of the offices that serve drivers in person, Tine said.
“Once we’ve done that, we can focus on being a better customer service organization,” he said.
There have already been 32,000 online driver’s license renewals in one four-week period, Tine said.
“You are already starting to see some change in demand in some of our offices,” he said.
The Legislature also funded 36 new positions.
“The governor called me and said you have 30 days to hire all these new positions, which I thought was aggressive,” Tine said. “But I said, ‘OK, let’s go.’ We were able to hire all of those in the first 30 days and get them into training very quickly.”
DMV previously allowed appointments only in the mornings, often leaving walk-ins waiting in line. The agency created a “dual pathway” system that serves both walk-ins and those with appointments in the morning, which has increased the number of licenses issued inside DMV offices by about 7% over last year.
Slow scanners have been replaced with faster ones, Tine said. DMV officials traveled to Arizona to look at their faster scanners.
“We found out that we could do about 90 seconds faster per transaction with the ones we just finished installing this week,” Tine said.
The state trained 123 examiners in the last six months, compared to 75 in all of 2024. The state also expanded the number of offices opened on Saturdays. The vacancy rate for full-time examiners has dropped from 10.9% to 4.1% in six months, Tine told legislators.
