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.

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"
    }
  }
}

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway for access to all 1392+ data sources:

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

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Iowa DOT Driver Licensing data" })

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

More

• All tools and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT