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 1476+ live data sources.

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

urlcam1..urlcam4 are live JPEG snapshots of the station lobby, refreshed by Iowa DOT — e.g. https://mvdphotos.iowadot.gov/MasonCityDL.jpg. Returned as queuecameraurls, they let a caller see the queue rather than guess at it. waittimesurl 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

comma — on every row. It is not passed through; state is normalised to IA.

• The upstream state column is dirty. It contains the literal ", IA" — with a leading

(outSR=4326) and reads coordinates from there.

• No latitude/longitude columns exist on this layer, so the query requests WGS84 geometry

MasonCityClosed.jpg. All non-empty slots are returned as published rather than guessed at.

• A second camera slot is often a "closed" placeholder. Mason City's url_cam4 points at

absent from hours is a closed day.

• Hours list open days only. hours_* carries the literal Closed for the rest; a day

design; filter by city, or use the coordinates.

• There is no county column. Iowa DOT keys these stations by city. county is null by

and points the caller at the full list plus coordinates rather than implying a data gap.

• 18 stations for the whole state, so most Iowa towns have none. The not-found hint says so

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/.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

— verified live 2026-07-30

• Iowa DOT ArcGIS DLSv2_View/FeatureServer/0

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 — askpipeworx, discovertools, 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.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.