California Department of Motor Vehicles - DMV

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CLOSED NOW - Opens at 7:00am

This is an older DMV which means it's smaller and lines can be long if you did not have an appointment. Overall the staff is always nice and street parking is usually available.

Just say "Speak to a technician" at the initial phone menu. After waiting just 11 minutes, a friendly operative answered. He was articulate & professional. My question was how late can people arrive without appt's at a local DMV office. In the end his response was "I work at the DMV & even I don't know!" Suprisingly, he was able to make this sound reasonable when he explained how every office is different. His final advice was to show prior to 3:30pm ( my office in question closes at 5pm ). I described a typical scenario at an office where people show up at 4pm at an office with a no-walk-in policy after 3:30pm. No profanity was used, but I mentioned walk-ins would be "pissed off". After hearing that phrase, his tone became defensive as he interruptedly explained his position "don't shoot the messenger..." and immediately hung up without allowing me a word edgewise. Under NO circumstance should you use profanity or even aggressive tone ( professional or otherwise ) as DMV phone operatives WILL hang up on you immediately! So don't ruffle feathers!

This site is very user friendly, easy to understand and follow. Accurate historical information, with awareness of security issues, gives enough information without infringing upon private information/issues, as well as lending a solid helping hand in researching the how, what, where type of inquiries.



I was doing some research on historical citation issues, for comparing my findings with insurance information and my home records, which all did match. I didn't need a lot of details, just the basic information to insure that all records reflect accurately.



There were a few cites I ran across, that I was actually amazed that the information was published on the web, like what type of violation (in detail), who, what and where was written for all the world to see, also showed payment, with almost all details, scary ... very, very scary. Not only that I needed only to enter any first two letters in the field titled last name, which then allowed access to ALL data. scary.. very, very scary. Nothing like supporting crime!



Really glad to see that there are some agency out there, like this one, that actually give you information, without spilling the beans.