Preface
This is an unofficial guide for British Columbians looking to book an ICBC Road Test as soon as possible in 2022. I know this method works because I recently failed my first Class 5 road test, and rebooked a test for 2 weeks after (and passed!). This is valuable for booking your first test in a pinch, or for booking a retest (you can retest as soon as 14 days after a failure, and you probably want to if you barely failed your first test). Given that the usual earliest available appointments are 3–6 months away, using this method can save you a lot of waiting time.
Method
The idea is to visit the booking site (https://onlinebusiness.icbc.com/webdeas-ui/home) just after midnight PST. Midnight is when the back-end of their site refreshes, revealing any cancelled appointments that are available for the taking. This method has been discussed online semi-frequently, but I couldn’t find confirmation that it still worked in recent history, so I decided to write this article.
After logging in, click the necessary buttons to get to the booking section, type in your location, and choose a testing center. The site usually fails to load appointments for the center for a while after midnight, so you need to refresh until you can see the appointments, at which point hopefully there is an appointment available to your liking. At this last stage, I’m not sure what the optimal strategy is, but I’ve made a few observations:
- The site is stuck for a while after midnight, so logging in quickly doesn’t seem to matter much.
- Refreshing the whole site seems to be more important than re-clicking the testing center. The former has made it show appointments when the latter failed fairly consistently.
- I got my soonest test appointment (Feb 24) at 3AM, long after midnight. I’m fairly certain the appointments don’t refresh in real-time because my first test adjudicator recommended I check for appointments “at nighttime”, so I think I just got really lucky.
Trying this for a few days almost gurantees that you get a test date sooner than the soonest that is normally available, and doing it for a few weeks almost guarantees that you get a really good spot. It only took me 5 days to get my perfect test! Of course, the more people that do this, the less effective it’ll be…regardless, good luck and drive safe!
P.S. I tried to automate the login process with Selenium and it put me into an infinite loop :(
