Things I Miss Most About Pennsylvania Include. . . The Department of Motor Vehicles.
Great Friends, Better Bike Trails, and BYOB Restaurants from Philly Suburbs are Missed. And Yes, Getting a New Drivers License and Auto Plates, Too.
Eight months ago my wife and I finally closed on the sale of our wonderful home on a nice acreage in the western Philadelphia suburbs and moved back - downsizing - close to where we began our marriage some 37 years ago - south Arlington, Virginia. It’s less than a mile from the townhouse we bought in 1985. And we love living right on top of Civil War history.
For those of you who have cycled through (or, still live) in the Washington, DC area, especially northern Virginia, it’s considered a right of passage to live in historic Fairlington Villages. America’s largest apartment complex at the time was hurriedly built during World War II to accommodate military officers being cycled through the Pentagon for training.
A decade ago, we bought a nice walk-up condo for use by the first college graduate in our household. Now, it’s all ours, about a fifth the size of our Pennsylvania home. We did the Fairlington thing in reverse, after the end of my career. It is a lovely, well-appointed, superbly managed and maintained, and highly desirable place to live - Amazon’s new HQ2 is less than 3 miles away; we are frequently serenaded by military helicopters that traverse nearby I-395 between Quantico and the Pentagon, not 5 miles away. The sound of freedom, my Army son says.
It was a homecoming of sorts. We left Virginia (Loudoun County) for Pennsylvania almost 20 years ago. Things have changed, and not all for the better. The place is more crowded, way more expensive, and less friendly than I remember. I blame the Pandemic for some of that. But not all.
The first thing I tried to do, as the weather warmed, was to rediscover the biking trails nearby that I traversed some three decades ago. I live near “mile 0” of the W.O.&D. trail and the Four Mile Run Trail, and the scenic Mount Vernon Trail. Over the past two decades, I fell in love with Philly trails, such as the Chester Valley Trail, the Perkiomen Trail, and of course America’s finest trail, the Schuykill River Trail.
But I was sorely disappointed with much of my return to Virginia. The trails are not as wide as Philly’s, are much more crowded, and are not nearly as well maintained, with several segments under repair and increasingly impassable with never-ending traffic stops. And a few of the bikers in Virginia are highly aggressive. They enjoy trying to needle between walkers, without warning, while speeding over 20 miles per hour on their $5,000 bikes and outfits featuring ads for companies you’ve never heard of.
You take your life into your own hands if you are a recreational biker, walker, or runner on many of northern Virginia’s trails on a nice weekend day. I never encountered people like this on Philly’s trails. Must be a DC thing. I do not bike on weekends and carefully pick my trails for walks and runs on weekends (not the W.O.&D. or Mount Vernon Trails). Philly’s trails have posted speed limits (15 mph). Not northern Virginia’s.
But you know what I miss about Pennsylvania, aside from great friends and a plethora of fantastic BYOB (yes, Bring Your Own Bottle of wine) restaurants (mostly Italian)?
The Department of Motor Vehicles. Don’t laugh.
Getting a driver’s license and a new title for your vehicle is pretty much a piece of cake in Pennsylvania, albeit not perfect. Yes, you need to go to two places. The DMV for your license, and the private “tag agent” for your license. But they are ubiquitous, and once you obtain them, the rest is easy and done online. Maybe I’ll find that to be the case in Virginia, at least as long as I’m here.
Being a good citizen, one of the first things I did, as I had done in Pennsylvania, was to visit Virginia’s DMV website. Not as friendly or navigable as Pennsylvania’s. And given the pandemic, I had to make an appointment. OK, but I had to wait 3 MONTHS. And I had to make not one, but two appointments - one for our licenses, and another for our auto titles and plates. And by the way, you still have to make an appointment, even now - no “walk-in” service. Too consumer-friendly, it seems, or perhaps too much fear-mongering over the bug, but at least some legislators are trying to fix that.
Upon arrival at a Pennsylvania facility, there is a help desk that kindly directs you (they have one at our Virginia facility, too, but he/she is more of a “show me your papers” gatekeeper). In Virginia, we were greeted by a surly, foreign-speaking agent who checked us in after not being able to find our names on a list, while exuding the friendliness as a Stasi agent. Other foreign nationals scolded us for being with 6 feet of other people in line. Once we found an agent, another foreign national (nothing wrong with that, by the way), who proved competent, helpful, and patient. But what a journey.
And we had to do it twice. Turns out Virginia’s website would not allow us, as new residents, to take care of business in one appointment or trip.
We finally did get our licenses and tags. But Virginia gets no points for efficiency.
Memo to future Governor Glenn Youngkin. I offer myself to help reinvent the Department of Motor Vehicles and especially its “customer experience.” Obviously, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe (who wants his old job back, God forbid) and his turgid black-faced (or, hood wearing), moon-walking successor, Ralph Northam, have done nothing to improve it. I am at your service.