[Bissness]

Bravo!

Bürgerämter are most of the time a fucking joke. My registration in Berlin took months after I already moved there, the waiting times are just that long, and this seems to apply to many cities. I live in another city now, and my ID card has been expired for months now (which, legally, is a misdemeanor). There isn't a single free appointment anywhere, citywide. You can attempt to go personally there in the early morning, yet here is what I encountered: arriving half an hour early to the Bürgeramt: THIRTY people waiting there, squatting in the hallways, all the way out to the door. On another day, arriving an HOUR before it opened: 12 people already waiting. It's all a joke. And this isn't a recent phenomenon - it's mismanagement for decades, the people responsible should all be fired (but of course that isn't possible).

There should be a "Minister for Time", who has the authority to crack down on such bullshit, not only in the German state bureaucracy, but also in the medical system (good luck getting any quick care here!). Both have taken to a level that is undignified, and wastes person-years of sitting in depressing places. Waiting should be an exception, not the norm, and there need to be metrics against that which have consequences.

[Goz3rr]

I ran into something similar as a Dutch person trying to buy a car from Germany. The initial plan was to drive the car back from Germany, but to do this I had to get an export license plate. This can only be done in the municipality where the car was sold, and they told me I was lucky because I could get an appointment quite quick, which was a month and a half from now. I would also have to bring the car to the Straßenverkehrsamt. How I would have gotten the car there was also a mystery to me, as I did not have a license plate and to get a license plate I would have to bring the car there. If I did somehow manage to do that though, I would have to get a physical license plate made and then get temporary insurance. Not a single German insurance company said they could insure the temporary license plate, as I was not already an existing customers of theirs. I ended up just renting a car transporter and bringing it home that way.

The process of getting a license plate once home was actually a breeze. I used the website of the Dutch Vehicle Authority to make an appointment (for the following day at 2pm) and they gave me a temporary license plate. I simply had to write this on a piece of cardboard and put it where the license plate would go. Called the cheapest insurance company to get temporary insurance, which was no problem, and simply drove the car to get it inspected.

[vasco]

To be honest though as a foreigner living in The Netherlands who doesn't speak a word of Dutch past "lekker", your bureaucracy and general services are probably one of the best in the world. Even your weird medical system is amazing when you actually need help - which I did and got top tier care, extremely fast. The Netherlands should just export their whole system to all of Europe, including the way information is documented in English in every official website.

On top you got a culture of being on time, which is prevalent everywhere, and you wait for stuff very seldomly, and only for a few minutes. Waiting for anything was one of my biggest irks in my home country, the fact that I can make an appointment, be there 5mins early, and get the service, blows my mind.

[nottheengineer]

There are red license plates for this exact case. Car dealerships generally have them to allow for test drives and bureaucracy drives.

If you buy a car (which is currently unregistered) from a private person that doesn't have those, you just did something that the bureaucracy didn't foresee and at that point, the best course of action is to avoid as much of it as possible.

At this point I have no hope that any of this will getter unless the german state collapses completely.

[Vingdoloras]

Here's what I do when I need to go to a Bürgeramt: For every type of appointment you can make, there should be an official website containing links to each Bürgeramt's calendar page. Bookmark that website, not the individual pages. Find one or a few locations you'd prefer, then open each calendar in a separate browser! Opening multiple in one browser doesn't work, as it remembers your last selection per browser session. Next, keep refreshing and checking the calendars every 30 minutes. Slots free up pretty often, but they're also full again soon after. If you're lucky, you can figure out when canceled appointments are entered into the system for your location (for mine it was 10AM every day). Around that time, there's a good chance you might even get a few slots that are only a week or two into the future. Once you figured out when slots open up, check around that time daily. Book the first slot you can get, then keep doing this for a few days and book any slot that is better than your previous one (but be nice and cancel the old slot).

It's a lot of work, and it shouldn't be necessary, but I'd never go into a Bürgeramt without an appointment and this method has worked for me every time so far.

[nicbou]

I wrote a tool for that: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/berlin-burgeramt-appointme...

It's officially sanctioned by the city, but it's capped to one request every 3 minutes to avoid replacing the official website. Every few months, I ask them for permission to add other services, and I get ghosted.

However, the tool is open source, so you can just `pip install` it and run it on any appointment type you want.

https://github.com/nicbou/burgeramt-appointments-websockets

[RileyJames]

This, with a little more automation, is exactly how I was able to book a covid quarantine hotel to return to NZ.

It felt pretty unfair that the average user was at an impossible disadvantage because the system had no protection against automation.

It was quite obvious others were already running automation, but I only booked for myself and then turned it off.

I was impressed NZ got a highly functional system up and running extremely quickly, but it became a game of high frequency trading.

[seb1204]

You make great use of modern technology and ingenuity. Congratulations, everyone should do the same. Sarcasm end. As a German living abroad I look in horror at the stories I read. Where I live changing the official registered address is a log into the gov services site, change it and two weeks late I get a letter with ned address stickers for my driver's licence. The driver licence on my phone does not need a sticker obviously.

[kioleanu]

You can automate that with a browser extension that checks the page and plays a sound when it changed

[inductive_magic]

I mean, from what I hear Berlin does take the cake on this one, but yes: its a country-wide phenomenon.

For what its worth, I was pleasantly surprised by the things you can do digitally in Kiel.

Schleswig-Holstein, Niedersachsen, Hamburg and Bremen have "Dataport", a publicly owned company which does a lot of the tech for public institutions in the area. While they are not operating at the efficiency of a normal company, they seem to be fairly useful. I'm not sure if something similar exists for other regions in Germany.

[bakuninsbart]

For Berlin specifically it is important to note the city-state was super broke until around 10 years ago. Many causes for this including mismanagement by the government, but the main cause is the GDR, how Berlin was divided, and how very little industry settled in or around Berlin.

Now this has changed a lot in the last decade or two, but it has been accompanied by avg. yearly net migration of 80k people which is putting a major strain on all public services.

[CalRobert]

That brings to mind the romance of waiting in the immigration queue in Dublin at 4 AM with my wife so we could get registered by the end of the day. https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/20853936/ . Simpler times.

Of course, the Irish government did eventually put in place an appointment booking system that was so comically bad bots would take all of the appointments immediately for resale on Facebook marketplace. It never crossed their mind to use a CAPTCHA. I only got my own appointment by writing a scraper for it.

[m_fayer]

I did that in Berlin about a decade ago and I think that only stopped happening here around 2018. I have fond memories of thermoses, multiple layers, a long grumpy queue trying to keep itself warm in pitch darkness. And then when the doors open, everyone rushes in to grab one of the few paper appointment tickets. Didn’t manage? Then try again the next day.

And that was actually a much-missed office hours system. If you had to see someone without waiting months, you waited from the middle of the night. Now you’re just screwed.

[fsniper]

That appointment system is the worst online registration system ever. In fact I suggest people having trouble to move outside of the Dublin area to avoid it. Then you would only need to call the garda and an immigration officer handles everything. You just visit the station on the appointed date with your documents.

I hate phone calls more than anyone, but this experience is far ahead of the appointment system one.

[PinguTS]

The trick is not to go to the main registration side but to the small local offices in the outer areas. Like in Nuremberg not going into the city center but to Katzwang or Großgründlach.

Sometimes you can got there without appointment and you can go in, because they have nothing to do and they are waiting happily for you and they are very friendly.

[ahf8Aithaex7Nai]

Try registering or deregistering a vehicle in a major German city. That once took me three months, because I simply couldn't get an appointment via the web interface set up especially for that purpose. Since Covid, the process is kind of broken, at least in my city.

[csunbird]

You might have chosen the worst example for your point, it is super duper easy to register a car online. I registered both of my cars online, the papers arrived in a week but I was able to drive and insure the vehicle without any interruptions. They give you a printout to carry around while the original registration papers arrive, but the police already knows whether the car is registered or not and will not bother you.

[G3rn0ti]

German here and a Berlin "native". In Germany, it is common knowledge that Berlin bureaucracy sucks even more so than on average. Part of it has to do with (Western) Berlin's history of being an island receiving a lot of subsidies. Nowadays, after re-unification, it still receives a lot of federal subsidies but for being the new country's capitol. As a consequence, Berlin's public sector is relatively large but not in the relevant branches and also lacking really competent personnel. So while Berlin spends Billions on paying public servants it cannot even maintain its basic public services, sadly.

I bet you would have had a much better experience everywhere else (even in Potsdam, Berlin's neighboring city).

[ivan_gammel]

In Berlin you can usually book a same day appointment for some city services including registration in the morning at 8:00-8:05, when they release few more slots. Sometimes you may need to go somewhere like Alt Tegel quickly, but that worked for me several times.

[gorbypark]

I am always in a similar situation in Valencia (Spain) when trying to book appointments. Fortunately, there is an integrated appointment system here and it's fairly trivial to automate checking for open appointments using their API. I can usually get one in a few hours by checking once per minute for free slots.

I also wrote something similar for getting a NIE appointment (foreigner's ID card) by using puppeteer (headless Chrome for node) to actually fill out the website for me, about once per 3 minutes (max without getting rate-limited).

I'm fortunate to have the skills to do so but I feel bad for the rest of the people who have to check websites for weeks at a time to get appointments.

[abdusco]

The trick is to look for appointments early in the morning. People who think they won't be able to make it to the appointment that day cancel theirs and there's a bunch of openings every morning.

[nicbou]

This is not true. I tested it before: https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/berlin-buergeramt-experimen...

[pjmlp]

This, it requires getting up around 6 AM or so, however there are always several slots made available for the same day, think last tickets sale for a concert.

[wdb]

Hah, yeah, renewing ID card or passports needs to be planned well ahead. I think my government advices few months ahead of expiring.

[morsch]

I can get an appointment for a new ID next week. Major city in Germany. Ymmv.