Ia Dmv MCP Server

@pipeworx/ia-dmv

Iowa DOT Motor Vehicle Division driver license stations — hours, CDL testing, and the live queue cameras Iowa points at its own waiting rooms. Keyless.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1856+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Why Iowa gets its own pack

This came out of splitting a single multiplexed us-dmv tool into one pack per state agency. Iowa's motor-vehicle surface is a small, unusually rich station layer: 18 stations, but each one ships live camera image URLs and a wait-time widget, which no other state publishes. Nothing about that shape generalises across a union schema, so Iowa gets its own tool.

Tools

Filters: city, name, cdl_only, limit.

The distinctive field

url_cam1..url_cam4 are live JPEG snapshots of the station lobby, refreshed by Iowa DOT — e.g. https://mvdphotos.iowadot.gov/MasonCityDL.jpg. Returned as queue_camera_urls, they let a caller see the queue rather than guess at it. wait_times_url is Iowa's own per-station wait widget. 17 of the 18 stations do CDL testing.

Auth

None. The layer is a public ArcGIS Online feature service owned by Iowa DOT.

Gotchas worth knowing

• The upstream state column is dirty. It contains the literal ", IA" — with a leading comma — on every row. It is not passed through; state is normalised to IA.
• No latitude/longitude columns exist on this layer, so the query requests WGS84 geometry (outSR=4326) and reads coordinates from there.
• A second camera slot is often a "closed" placeholder. Mason City's url_cam4 points at MasonCityClosed.jpg. All non-empty slots are returned as published rather than guessed at.
• Hours list open days only. hours_* carries the literal Closed for the rest; a day absent from hours is a closed day.
• There is no county column. Iowa DOT keys these stations by city. county is null by design; filter by city, or use the coordinates.
• 18 stations for the whole state, so most Iowa towns have none. The not-found hint says so and points the caller at the full list plus coordinates rather than implying a data gap.

What is not buildable for Iowa today

Iowa's richest motor-vehicle data — county-level vehicle registrations and fleet summaries — lives on data.iowa.gov, which migrated off Socrata. Every old API path (/resource/<id>.json, /api/views/...) now answers with an HTML 404 page from the new portal front end rather than JSON, so a registration tool would be building on a dead endpoint. Recheck when the new Iowa Data Hub exposes an API; until then this pack is stations only, deliberately.

Data source

• Iowa DOT ArcGIS DLSv2_View/FeatureServer/0 — verified live 2026-07-30

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ia-dmv": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/ia-dmv/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/ia-dmv/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1856+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/ia_dmv_driver_license_stations \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"city":"Mason City"}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/ia_dmv_driver_license_stations. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Run it from npm

@pipeworx/mcp-ia-dmv is a local stdio bridge to the Pipeworx gateway: your MCP client starts it with npx, and it forwards every call to the same https://gateway.pipeworx.io/ia-dmv/mcp endpoint shown above. It needs network access; there is no offline mode.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ia-dmv": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-ia-dmv"]
    }
  }
}

Without a key it calls anonymously, capped at 50 calls a day. A free account raises that to 200 a day: get a key at https://pipeworx.io/signup and add "env": { "PIPEWORX_API_KEY": "<your key>" } to the server entry. The key is sent as a Bearer token, the same way a hosted connection sends it, so calls are metered and billed exactly as they are there.

It lists only this pack's tools by default. Set PIPEWORX_META_TOOLS=1 to also list ask_pipeworx and the other gateway-wide tools.

Behind an HTTPS proxy: Node's built-in fetch does not read HTTPS_PROXY by default. Newer Node releases honour it when NODE_USE_ENV_PROXY=1 is set; check your Node version's documentation.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Ia Dmv data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT