This website will let you get an overview of what the wait times at all the MassRMV branches is like on on average. Hopefully you can find a good time to go and save some time not waiting for your number to be called. Let's be glad we're not standing in line anymore.

I got the idea to do this site sometime in 2001 when I had to go to the RMV and was dreading waiting for 50 minutes at the downtown Boston location. I wrote a little script to harvest the wait times for the Boston branch for 2 weeks and I was armed with all the information I needed to not wait in line.

I initially used gnuplot to make a rudimentary plot of the wait times. Yay.

The project basicaly slept for two or three years. Every now and then some friends of mine whom I had told about the project would ask me if I still had that information. Hmm, powerful concept. People keep coming back

In September of 2003 I decided to start harvesting the RMV wait times again, this time for all branches. I let that sit for a few months until January 2004 when I got started building the website. I had just finished doing a consulting project in PHP and was psyched to use PHP for something else. It's a great language to hack out a quick website. 1and1.com had some free hosting available and I had some time on my hands so I decided to get started.

The current system harvests the wait times from all RMV branches every 5 minutes and dumps it into a MySQL database. In fact there are currently 661,554 wait times in the database. I'm using JpGraph to generate all the plots.

I'm curious why the RMV hasn't published this kind of data on their website. I feel that the current wait time is quite useless. Maybe the RMV has to pay more licensing fees to the company that manages their queing system and therefore that data's staying off the website. Hmmm...

I hope you find the information useful. I'm curious if enough people will ever see this to make the chart start flattening out.

cheers,
  Volker -- feedback@massrmvwait.com