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(first paragraphs of article, also the deadline for Real ID is May 7th so that makes this article relevant, fuck off)
Kimberly Pichardo, 27, took a spot in the DMV line around 9 a.m. on a cloudless Wednesday, back when her phone was fully charged and she wasn’t worried about the afternoon pickup time at her son’s school.
But as 2 o’clock approached under the Miami sun, a couple dozen people still stood between Pichardo and the Miami Central DMV office inside a shopping center off the Dolphin Expressway. Teachers had dismissed her son’s class about a half-hour earlier, leaving Pichardo to scramble for a plan B while her phone’s battery remained alive.
“I called my mom to pick him up right before my phone died,” Pichardo said. “What can I do?”
For people like Pichardo needing a driver’s license issued or updated in South Florida, there’s no easy answer to that question beyond the obvious one: get in line and wait.
Online portals for the 15 DMV offices in Broward and Miami-Dade routinely show no openings available — even eight weeks out.
Lines for walk-up slots at the offices start forming hours before the doors open — and sometimes even the night before. While the staff did eventually open their doors to everyone in line the day Pichardo arrived, waits lasted hours.
“It’s a mess,” Tax Collector Dariel Fernandez said as he approached the afternoon line outside the Central office, an operation he recently inherited from the state. “We’ve got to fix it.”
