My Experience Renewing Driving License on Different City in Indonesia
So, my driving license is about to expire, and I need to renew it before its too late. Because once its dead, it means I have to retake all the test again which is time consuming.
It’s been 5 years since the last time I went to police station to deal with driving license, and during those 5 years, a lot of thing has changed. The most notably is the absence of brokers.
Five years ago it is very common for brokers, both internally from the police itself or outside people to help (pay more of course) people to process their driving license. Now, people are expected to process on their own, which is good because it actually reduce the chance of bribery.
So I arrived at the police station at 07.30, and the queue line is already long. The locket will open at 08.00, so I ended up standing on the line and wait until it opens.
At 08.00, I heard an announcement telling that the locket will open soon, and that only people that have their driving license expires within 14 days can be processed. Luckily, my driving license will end exactly in 14 days. Other people that wanted to create a new driving license have their own queue lines.
I ended up getting the queue number 79, and they divides the queue by groups. So the first group is 0–20, second 21–40, etc. So I waited at least 2 hours for my group, yes 2 hours.
The condition were actually very cheerful, contrary to popular beliefs that police are scary, the police try to make jokes too, which I found funny when he ask some guy attending the driving test to close his mouth, because apparently he always opened his mouth when driving, and after he said that the guy is trying so hard to close his mouth it looks funny.
I talk with the others and shared some experiences, because standing for 2 hours is tiring, and 2 hours just standing and playing with phones is just boring. So I talked with some people and some of them said that some woman already tried to take the driving test for 9 times and still fails.
Once my group has been called, I entered the building and given a renewal form to fill, just fill the fields there and ask if you do not know about some fields. Once its done, I still have to wait for the previous group to finish, once it finished, another officer called my group and we queue again to handle the documents.
So I prepared my Nationality Card (+copy), Previous Driving License(+copy), Health Reports, and Renewal Form. Once the officer accepted the document, I just wait until another officer called me that it is my time to take photo.
I am actually a little bit pessimist about whether they will accept my documents or not because my previous driving license was published from different city, but it is actually not an issue and they accept my documents, contrary to popular beliefs that you can not renew your driving license from a different publisher.
So I went to the photo room, do some fingerprint scanning, take portrait, and then pay the renewal fee which is Rp75.000 (approx. $7) for Motorcycle Driving License, and that’s it. The officer give me my renewed driving license and then I go home with the sky shed tears on my departure (yes, it was raining and I am soaked wet).
