The DMV doesn’t know how long you’ve been in line. Agency’s head says that will change.

The state Division of Motor Vehicles doesn’t really know how long people have been waiting in line at its driver’s license offices, and the head of the agency said Wednesday it will try to fix that.

The amount of time a customer has waited in line for service is an important measure of how the DMV is doing, said Commissioner Torre Jessup. The department measures average wait times at all 113 of its driver’s license offices every week, and aggregates that data to produce monthly and annual totals. The goal, Jessup said, is a statewide average of no more than 30 minutes.

But under its current system, the clock doesn’t start running until the customer reaches a representative inside the door, receives a number and takes a seat. What’s not counted is the amount of time customers spend in line before receiving a number.

That can take hours at some offices, particularly in the Triangle and other urban areas. In July, for example, when lines to get into the North Raleigh driver’s license office off Spring Forest Road stretched outside and around the corner of the building, DMV records show that the average wait time there was just under 40 minutes.

“That’s something that we’re working on with our queuing system, improving that queuing system to do a number of things, including more accurately capturing that period of time when the customer is at the DMV,” Jessup told members of the state Board of Transportation on Wednesday.

Wait times at DMV spiked this summer, with lines getting so long that the agency asked for volunteers from the Department of Transportation to hand out cold bottles of water to people who had to wait outside in the heat.

DMV officials say summer is usually a busy time, as students come in for permits, IDs and licenses before school starts, but other factors, including dozens of unfilled jobs, made things worse. New this summer is the demand for REAL ID, a type of driver’s license that satisfies federal ID requirements starting in October 2020. Unlike a standard license renewal, which can be done online, people must visit a driver’s license office to get a REAL ID.

Jessup said wait times have improved in recent weeks, as students head back to school and the agency has redeployed employees to better handle the crowds. He told the Board of Transportation that the number of driver’s license offices with average wait times under an hour grew from 60 to 70 in the last week, and that the number of offices where people waited 2 hours or more on average dropped from eight to zero.

Jessup acknowledges that those numbers may not capture the full time people wait at the DMV, particularly at offices with the longest lines. He said the agency will explore ways to better measure wait times that could include virtual ticketing that would allow people to use their phones to check in at a DMV office without even being present.

He said simply handing paper tickets to people outside the buildings probably wouldn’t work.

“It would be a challenge to our current system to be able to give a physical paper copy of a ticket to everybody in line,” he said. “But I do realize that the lines have been long, and we need to better figure out how we accurately measure that so that we can improve that.”

This story was originally published September 5, 2018 at 4:06 PM.