The SF DMV is somehow the worst it's ever been, visitors say

The line for the California Department of Motor Vehicles wraps around the other side of the building on Thursday, July 5, 2018, in San Francisco. Click through the slideshow to see vanity plates that got rejected by the DMV. less The line for the California Department of Motor Vehicles wraps around the other side of the building on Thursday, July 5, 2018, in San Francisco. Click through the slideshow to see vanity plates that got ... more Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 47 Caption Close The SF DMV is somehow the worst it's ever been, visitors say 1 / 47 Back to Gallery

It's a basic truism that a trip to the DMV is usually an exercise in punishing frustration not unlike the outermost circles of hell in Dante's Inferno, a "house of suffering" where "no thing gleams" and the air is filled with sighs of despair.

But on a recent visit to renew her driver's license — a task which took five hours — San Francisco resident Spring Utting was stunned at just how bad things were. The line was all the way around the building and across the parking lot, and even people with appointments were stuck waiting hours, she said.

When she arrived about 1 p.m., the pace was glacial, as the line inched into the building, eventually allowing her to make her way inside and take a number. But when the clock struck 5, she said, it was like a switch flipped.

"I had 100 people in front of me," she recalled of the wait,"and I noticed that when it hit 5 o'clock the numbers started moving, I swear, in double time."

"At 5 o'clock, they're motivated, because what they said is they will take everybody who's in line at 5."

When her number was finally called, Utting said there was somehow more unpleasantness in store after she asked the man helping her if the REAL ID Act was to blame for the worsened wait.

"'No, it's because of your political party," Utting, a registered Democrat, said he told her. "You can thank Jerry Brown and the loonies in Sacramento."

She said feeling like the man was using information from her paperwork against her was the "worst part" of the whole bad experience.

"I was absolutely livid," she said. "I thought that was so inappropriate, that's my personal information that he's processing."

She witnessed other moments when the inefficiency bordered on cruelty, as when a man who had already been assigned a number left the building to smoke a cigarette, only to be told when he tried to come back in that he'd have to give up his number and go back to the end of the line.

"When he walked out, they should've said, 'You know you can't come back in,'" said Utting.

One commonly blamed source for the worsened waits is the REAL ID act, which requires Californians to replace their driver's licenses by 2020 if they want to use them for air travel, requiring time-intensive paperwork for DMV office workers. A startup that's charging $19.99 a pop for "expedited appointments" doesn't seem to be helping matters.

The average wait time without an appointment across all 27 Bay Area DMV offices increased nearly an hour for the first half of June compared with the same time last year, from 47 minutes to an hour and 43 minutes — and that wait time only starts to be measured after people get in the door and take a ticket, DMV spokesman Marty Greenstein told The Chronicle.

People could be in line "for hours" before they get the queue ticket, he said, and it seems more often than not, they are.

Utting is far from the only one with grievances. People online complain of four-block long lines, eight-hour waits, lines of hundreds of people that form before the office even opens, and only a fraction of service windows being staffed.

"The woman at the DMV told me yesterday that the line would be much shorter today," KRON4 reporter Lydia Pantazes wrote on Twitter on Saturday, "but she failed to tell me they were closed."

Utting had a word of warning for those who think an appointment will deliver them from the DMV's hellish waits.

"If you think you're gonna be there with an appointment and get in and out," she cautioned, "there's no chance."

Got a DMV horror story of your own? Reach out: fioannou@sfchronicle.com

Filipa Ioannou is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at fioannou@sfchronicle.com and follow her on Twitter