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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your form helped immensely in the anmeldung process last year for me. Keep fighting the good fight sir.
By the way, the Kfz-Zulassungsstelle is allegedly one of the best-organised offices on Berlin. It's all downhill from there.
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.
If you are in possession of the title of the car, yes.
However if you lease a car, the leasing company will just post the lease to the Zulassungsstelle so that you will not be in possession of the title at any time. So it will require you to go there in person.
Berlin isn't centralized, but the districts (Bezirke) have quite some freedom to structure their work (similar to "kommunale Selbstverwaltung" in other states) and how they run the administration offices (Bürgerämter etc.) which then leads to city administration passing a law for something and each district implementing it differently and city administration having no authority to override district decisions, while taking the blame.
Fixing this requires a change to the constitution, but that requires a 2/3 majority in the city assembly (Abgeordnetenhaus) or a referendum. Getting the majority is hard as there are varying differences (from parties being happy about number of posts to full, like district mayors etc.) and "dislike" between districts (East/West, center/outer, ..)
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.
I hate phone calls more than anyone, but this experience is far ahead of the appointment system one.
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.
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.
I bet you would have had a much better experience everywhere else (even in Potsdam, Berlin's neighboring city).
While some countries provide a non-binding translation for many things, someone could set the precedent in court that the English translation if relied on by enough people is somewhat binding or similar - Result would be two slightly different (mis-)understandings about the law, due process and bureaucracy from official sources. That could be have unforseen consequences.
Just because many people happen to speak English doesn't mean everyone has to.