Q. Always enjoy your column and particularly the good news about those 70 and over being able to renew online. When you ask the Department of Motor Vehicles for more details, can you find out if that is true even if your renewal notice says you are supposed to take the written test? It would seem the officials could easily put that test online, too, or else waive it because of COVID.
– Mary Ledding, Los Angeles
A. Honk isn’t a Rhodes scholar, but he does know that bringing good tidings increases his popularity. And in this case, he can do just that.
You won’t have to take those tests this time if you renew online, over the phone or by mail, Ivette Burch, a DMV spokesman up in Sacramento, told Honk.
As Mary suggests, Honk intended to get more dope on the renewals and here are some other tidbits:
“The online renewal option is the quickest for the customer,” Burch said.
The renewals will be for five years from when your license was to originally expire. If you received a one-year extension, you can now renew for the remainder of those five years.
Renewals aren’t automatic. If someone has a medical situation that the DMV wants to check out, or their recent driving record is of concern, say with citations or an arrest, the driver would be told they need to go into a DMV office to try and get the license renewed.
The DMV says it will start taking online renewal applications for driver licenses on Sunday, Dec. 6, at dmv.ca.gov.
Q. Hey, Mr. Honk: Exiting the northbound 57 Freeway at Yorba Linda Boulevard the other evening, I found myself stopping just as the light turned red. I sat there listening for not quite the full length of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which I don’t like. Anyway, the light seemed AWFULLY long, so I looked up the length of the song, and it is six minutes and 29 seconds! Who is in charge of that light timing, and why in the world is the red so long?
– Marty Haynes, Placentia
A. Gordon Lightfoot’s tune, a nod to the fate of a cargo ship that sank in Lake Superior in 1975, killing all 29 crew members, is indeed a long one.
As to that traffic signal, it is maintained by Caltrans. After Honk passed along your concern to the agency’s Orange County district, Caltrans had a traffic engineer visit the signal and determined it was properly working at that time.
Those lights there are to cycle through every 90 seconds, a time drawn up based on the intersection and flow of traffic.
So you shouldn’t have made it through that song, and Honk isn’t sure what happened. But who hasn’t sat at a traffic light for what seems like the length of “Stairway to Heaven” or some other marathon-length melody?
If that occurs because the signal seems out of sorts, contact the agency involved. For any Caltrans complaint: csr.dot.ca.gov.
Honkin’ fact: In 2006 there were nearly 1,300 call boxes dotting Orange County’s freeways, toll roads and selected highway stretches, averaging 135 calls a day from stranded motorists and others. Cellphones and roving Freeway Service Patrol tow trucks, which during certain hours and places provide immediate aid for free to drivers in broken-down vehicles, have decreased the need for the call boxes. These days in Orange County, less than three calls a day come in, and the latest round of cuts will leave O.C. with 292 of the once-valued lifelines. (Source: Honk’s archives and the Orange County Transportation Authority.)
To ask Honk questions, reach him at honk@ocregister.com. He only answers those that are published. To see Honk online: ocregister.com/tag/honk. Twitter: @OCRegisterHonk
Posted by: https://anaheimsigns.com
No comments:
Post a Comment