Pennsylvania License Plate: The only one
you’ll find on my Jeep, and it’s on the rear lift
gate. [ Photo: Dave Aiello ]
Kathleen and I spent several hours yesterday working our way through the bureaucracy of the Pennsylvania Department of Motor Vehicles, also known as the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation or PennDOT. I found the overall experience better than I did with the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, but New Jersey was one of the worst systems in the country before it started enacting reforms recently.
What blew my mind about the process of getting new titles, license plates, and registrations for our cars was the gaps in the information provided by the DMV in How To Title and Register Your Out-of-State Vehicle in Pennsylvania. This page tells you how to get a new title and registration for your car, but it says nothing about license plates. It also implies that you should go to the DMV to do this business, when most Pennsylvanians go to a insurance agency or another business specializing in “auto tags”.
Maybe this is the way it is in the rest of the country, but in New Jersey the Motor Vehicle Commission issues license plates and the only way to get them without going there yourself is to get someone from a car dealership to go and do the work on your behalf.
The Driver’s License Procedure made a lot more sense. The people at the Bensalem, PA office of PennDOT were overjoyed when we showed up with all the correct identity documents, including our marriage license. I guess they deal with a lot of folks who don’t look at their website, or had the same experience we did with getting tags and just disregarded all of the other information on the site.
I guess everyone wastes many hours when they move and sometimes moving from one state to another makes things considerably worse. However, I expect that when I find authoritative information on a state’s website it would better reflect reality.
Did I mention that Pennsylvania only issues one license plate per car and you put it on the back? I guess that’s an oddity on par with not being able to pump your own gas in New Jersey.
Finally, I have a question about vehicle inspection in Pennsylvania that I have not seen answered anywhere on-line:
If I get a car inspected at a repair shop and it fails the inspection for some reason, do I have to pay the full price at that repair shop to have the car reinspected?