Something good, bad and ugly

I had my driver’s license renewed last week. I had just come from a meeting in Pasig City, and I remembered having recently seen a big sign along the side of the nearby Tiendesitas shopping center saying there is a driver’s license renewal center there. So I headed to it, not sure if it was even a good idea to bother doing so, knowing it was late in the day (nearly 4 p.m.). Would they still accept new applicants beyond 4:00, given the likely process queue? Would they even still be open? I took the chance anyway, counting on getting senior-citizen priority in any case.

It wasn’t even necessary. I got to the Land Transportation Office satellite licensing center a little past 4 p.m., and was done in less than 15 minutes. Only two other applicants came within my brief stay. I realized it was not only a good idea, but indeed a better idea, to come after 4:00 when the peak crowds were all gone—and yes, they’re open until 5:00. That the whole process took me less than 15 minutes this time, whereas past renewals took a big chunk off my working day, was the good part of the experience—kudos to the front-line LTO personnel for that. The other good part is that the renewed license is now good for five years, when before it was only three—with a proportionately higher fee, of course.

But, there is a bad part. You still don’t get your new plastic card. All they could give was a rubber stamp on the official receipt of payment that says “Temporary Licence (sic) Valid for 5 Years,” with the verbal instruction to “watch out in the media” for announcements on the new plastic cards. Like the case of the legendary (or is “mythical” now the better word?) new vehicle license plates that most of us still don’t have, up to three years after paying for them, this rubber stamp sounds a bit ominous. I hope they don’t really mean that they’re giving themselves up to five years to produce the “permanent licence” (and I don’t suppose that the spelling implies that these have been outsourced to faraway Britain).

And then there’s the ugly part, which has been there for many years, and yet no one seems to care enough to do something about it. I refer to what a motoring magazine has termed “the most legal scam in the country today.” This is the supposed “medical exam” one has to go through prior to the LTO license renewal itself. Thank God they have done away with that pointless so-called “drug test” (the war on drugs notwithstanding). That’s when they made you go through the motions of passing urine into a little container, even as your test results were already typed out before you could hand them your sample (that was at least my experience the last time I went through it).

Still, the “medical clearance” remains a requirement, and whoever manages to put up the sole onsite “clinic” in the vicinity of the renewal centers must be making quite a killing with the captive overpriced market. One wonders how they get to be chosen, and what kind of mechanism the LTO has to accredit them. At Tiendesitas, it’s “Thinkwise Medical Services,” which charged P350 to have me read a line of four letters on the wall. There was no measurement of height and weight (I have a friend whose weight in his license is still 20 kilograms ago), no blood pressure test, not even a cursory physician’s exam. I spent all of three minutes in the “clinic”, and the bigger part of that time was spent writing out my receipt—which wasn’t even signed (attention: BIR). The internet has stories of experiences in such “clinics”—some of them comedic—that all amount to the same thing: We’re all paying far more money than we should for something that any self-respecting medical practitioner shouldn’t want to be associated with. Calling the Fair Trade Enforcement Bureau: Perhaps it’s time we curbed this obvious rip-off.

I’m still glad, and I know many are, too, that renewing one’s license can now be done quickly. But I wish the experience doesn’t have to leave a bad taste in the mouth because of the bad and ugly things that still accompany it, thanks to some geniuses in the government, along with wise-thinking private opportunists that the government itself abets.

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