Ministry of Transportation Ontario Online Transaction - FAIL!

Although I have been in Canada since 2001, I started my drivers license graduated program in 2004 only - I should have done it earlier but that is not the point of this post.

The Ministry of Transportation in Ontario has an online transaction application to process your test booking - unfortunately this application seems to suffer from major problems. I recall this happened to me when I booked my G drive test. Say I was going North and hit a stop sign and was going to turn East, I did not wait for the car that was on the East side heading West to clear the intersection and apparently that was a "dangerous maneuver"

So the online drive test booking engine stalled on processing my booking request yesterday so I have no idea whether the transaction went through or not and now I have to wait until it shows up on my credit card online report.

Over the past decade we came to expect certain applications to work in a certain way - when we want to make a purchase online we expect the transaction to complete successfully or let you know what went wrong. Online transactions are supposed to be easy to use, increase throughput and be convenient by avoiding you to have to line up somewhere - but when it does not work this is a problem. I waited 70 minutes for the transaction and it still did not complete.

For online retailers, this failure results in lost business, there are many of them so you can easily switch to someone else and make the purchase there - unfortunately there is only one Ministry of Transportation but this does not mean that their online applications can be below average. MTO needs to look at people using their online apps to book tests or pay fines as customers as well. Yes you are going to pay anyway sooner or later since you have no other option, but money now is always better than money next month. If I was ordering pizza online and this happened odds are my pizza will be free.