Lines at Miami’s DMV offices stretch for hours. What’s being done?

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.”

For now, Florida still controls all five driver’s-license offices in Broward and seven of the 10 in Miami-Dade. Until January, those were the only two counties in Florida that still had appointed tax collectors, meaning they were also the only two counties to have state-run DMVs.

A constitutional amendment passed in 2018 now requires all counties to elect their tax collectors. In November, Miami-Dade voters elected Fernandez, a Republican software company owner, and Broward voters elected Abbey Ajayi, a Democrat and veteran of that county’s Tax Collector’s Office.

Those elections also triggered the slow-moving end to the state running DMV offices in South Florida. State rules require elected tax collectors to run licensing offices in their counties, and now Broward and Miami-Dade fall under that mandate.

While an Ajayi spokesperson said the Broward Tax Collector’s Office plans to take over state DMV offices next summer, Fernandez is adding them to his portfolio already.

Last month, he took over the Northside Justice Center DMV office (15555 Biscayne Blvd. in North Miami) and said he expects to take over the DMV’s Mall of the Americas location (7795 W. Flagler St. near Westchester) sometime in May. He also brought driver’s-license services to the Tax Collector’s Office headquarters in downtown Miami (200 NW Second Ave.).

The takeover comes as DMV offices are overwhelmed by demand in South Florida, with visa crackdowns spurring more immigrants to secure government identification and a May 7 deadline looming for the federal Real ID program, which requires U.S. citizens to have up-to-date licenses or a passport if they want to board a domestic flight. (In Florida, a Real ID-compliant license has a star on the upper right corner.)

Fernandez promises major improvements on wait times and says progress is already underway in the three DMV locations his staff now runs.

“We inherited a crisis,” he said.

A representative for the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles was not available for comment this week.

Andrew Lopez, director of motorist services under Fernandez, said the Tax Collector’s Office has expanded staffing at the Central office in the past few weeks.

On the day of Pichardo’s visit, there were 33 windows open inside, up from about a dozen when the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles turned it over to Fernandez earlier this month. With more windows open, more people are being seen — Lopez said the average daily count is now about 700 customer visits on an average day, up from about 450 when the Tax Collector’s Office took over.

Fernandez said he added credit-card scanners to each window, saving a trip to the cashier’s section for customers who don’t want to pay in cash.

He also says Central is seeing a reduction in no-show appointments after improved scheduling software eliminated the ability to book unlimited time slots with a single phone number. Fernandez said the old software his office inherited allowed driving schools to tie up hundreds of time slots a day for students, even though most of the appointments were never used. Fernandez backed legislation recently approved by the County Commission imposing fines on anyone caught “scalping” a DMV appointment.

He’s also predicting more appointment availability as Central and the other former state-run offices shift fully to appointments made under the new system. Fernandez said Central each day has about 400 appointments made under the state reservation framework — time slots the Tax Collector’s Office inherited. He said the last of those state-made appointments — which Fernandez said tend to mean lots of no-shows — should be retired sometime in May, and he thinks it will be easier for people to make an appointment after that.

He expects his office’s booking software to also utilize AI technology to steer people to their closest DMV office, as well as speed the processing time at windows by helping staff inspect the documents required for new or modified driver’s licenses.

Whatever improvements may be coming, Pichardo’s experience highlights the current struggles for getting a license issued, updated or renewed in South Florida.

Here are some tips to make the process a bit less frustrating:

Beat the early birds in DMV lines

This is easier said than done, with some people camping out overnight to secure their slots in line. A 72-year-old Broward resident named Harvey told the Herald he arrived at the Sunrise DMV office at 3 a.m. to wait for the 8 a.m. opening. “I was No. 77 in line,” he said. Harvey, who asked that his last name not be published, said the people in the front of the line had arrived at 9 the night before.

Nina Dape drove the 20 miles between her home in Hollywood and the Miami-Dade Tax Collector’s main office in downtown Miami on a recent morning, arriving around 3:30 a.m. “I was sixth in line,” the 19-year-old student said. The first person there — who didn’t want to give his full name — said he’d arrived at 12:30 a.m. Both were let into the downtown office the moment the doors opened at 8:30 a.m.

Getting to the DMV early is key, given that the number of slots for walk-in customers at some offices can be quite limited. With only eight DMV windows, the downtown Miami office typically accepts 30 walk-ins at the start of the day but will accommodate more depending on the number of no-shows for appointments, a spokesperson said.

Don’t wait to hunt for a DMV appointment in Broward or Miami-Dade

Appointments on the state and county online booking portals aren’t impossible to get — but they’re probably going to require some advanced planning. In the middle of April, the state’s Miami Gardens DMV office had some morning appointments available — but not until mid-June.

Carlos Castillo, 41, was able to get a new Florida license two hours after arriving at the Central office on a recent afternoon, thanks to securing a 2 p.m. appointment he’d made weeks earlier. The Illinois transplant said he went online on Feb. 26 and that April 16 was the earliest slot he could reserve. He said he was stunned the wait was so long to get a license with his new address. “In Chicago, it’s pretty straightforward,” he said.

Prepare to camp to get a driver’s license renewed

For large DMV offices like Central (at 3721 NW Seventh St. in Miami), endurance can make the difference between a wasted day that ends with no license and a long day that ends with getting a license renewed or issued. Anthony Martinez, 27, arrived at Central roughly the same time as Pichardo. By 1 p.m., he said there would have been even more people ahead of him if not for an endurance gap.

“The reason we’re here is so many people gave up and left,” he said. “This is ridiculous.”

Like Pichardo, Martinez did make it to the front of the line at the Central DMV office that day after about a five-hour wait.

The line on the unshaded sidewalk in the shopping center parking lot grew and contracted throughout the day. It finally vanished around 4 p.m. after Tax Collector staff came out to instruct the last group of people to come inside the air-conditioned office.

Jorge Bonet had been there since 10:30 am. Five hours later, his wife drove by to drop off a chocolate shake and McChicken sandwich from McDonald’s.

“I haven’t eaten anything all day,” he said.

This story was originally published April 21, 2025 at 5:00 AM.