If you’ve ever sat in a DMV waiting room for three hours just to renew your license, you might take some dark comfort in knowing the agency is equally unprepared at the executive level, too.
Last week, California DMV Director Steve Gordon appeared before state lawmakers for what turned out to be a pretty uncomfortable informational hearing — the legislature’s first deep dive into motor vehicle fatalities in decades. And if you were hoping the head of the agency responsible for deciding who gets to operate a two-ton vehicle at freeway speeds had a firm grip on the data, well… buckle up.
When Assemblywoman Caroline Menjivar, a Democrat from Van Nuys, asked Gordon whether it was true that out of 56,000 collisions involving death or serious injury over the past three years, only about 3,300 had actually been investigated by the DMV to determine if those drivers should still have a license, his response was something like a shrug in sentence form.
“I do not know the answer to that question.”
That’s roughly a 6% investigation rate, for those keeping score at home. Meaning that for every 100 crashes serious enough to kill or hospitalize someone, the DMV apparently looked into whether the driver behind the wheel should still be driving in fewer than six of those cases. The other 94? Carry on.
Reckless California Drivers With Bad Records Still Have Their License
Image Credit: Hun Young Lee / Shutterstock.
The hearing follows a joint investigation by CalMatters, which found the DMV has a pattern of allowing drivers with genuinely alarming records to keep their licenses without much scrutiny. It’s the kind of story that makes you look twice at the car merging aggressively into your lane on the 405 and wonder, has anyone ever looked into this person? And it’s not the first time that the California DMV has made questionable decisions regarding driver’s licenses.
To be fair to car enthusiasts: yes, driving is a freedom, a lifestyle, a passion — and nobody’s trying to take your weekend canyon runs away from you. But there’s a difference between loving cars and the DMV treating fatal crash investigations as optional homework.
Lawmakers, for their part, seem done waiting. This legislative session, California’s Capitol has about a dozen bills in the works specifically aimed at reckless driving, which supporters are calling the most significant package of traffic safety reforms in a generation. The political will appears to finally be there — now the question is whether the agency tasked with enforcing the rules can keep up.
Gordon’s office has not yet offered updated answers to the questions he couldn’t field during the hearing. The DMV, however, remains open Monday through Friday, with limited Saturday hours, in case you’d like to take a number.