All Things Travel: Boston RMV Relocates To New Office
CBS (BOSTON) - The Registry of Motor Vehicles Division will open its new downtown Boston office in Haymarket Square on Monday morning.
The address is 136 Blackstone St. in a building owned by the state Transportation Department with the entrance facing the Greenway.
The location is at the Haymarket MBTA station making it convenient for commuters walking past the building on their way to North Station.
The building will also house the Boston Public Market scheduled to open next year.
The RMV, which will also offer EZ-Pass services, will occupy two floors of the renovated building where over 60 workers will be located.
The RMV hosted a tour last week at their new facility. And gone are the hard wooden benches, replaced by more comfortable individual plastic chairs. Twenty-seven hundred computerized work stations will handle both license and vehicle registration matters.
Last Wednesday, Registrar Celia Blue held her first low number license plate lottery at the new site, drawing 150 numbers from over 7,000 applicants. Nancy Brewton, of Newton, won the number 351 plate.
In the past 12 months, over 359,000 people visited the Boston Registry office, one of 30 throughout Massachusetts. The next office expected to be remodeled will be located in Springfield.
In 2013, there were 6,034,558 vehicles registered in the Commonwealth.
Massachusetts was the first state to issue license plates, blue in color with white letters, in 1903. The size of the plate was about one third of today's plate.
The Massachusetts Legislature started to look at the problem of new automobiles in 1892 and wanted "to create order on the roads." One hundred and twenty-two years later, the situation still exists.
Here is a new suggestion for the RMV-after more than 30 years, it could be time for Massachusetts to review its license plate slogan: "The Spirit Of America" with three or four words promoting tourism.
Bob Weiss reports on business travel on Mondays at 5:55 a.m. on WBZ NewsRadio 1030.
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