060-2-060
Wisconsin gives you your old driver license number back when you return to the state. They also say "Welcome back!" They do not make jokes about cheese.
Actually, Wisconsin sort of has to give you your old number again because it is assigned based on your name, sex, and birthday.
Names are encoded using the Soundex algorithm which is supposed to map similar sounding names to the same code.
I thought everybody in Wisconsin knew about this, but the folks working at the DMV today claimed ignorance. I did not have to take even a written test. That's scary, because people moving to Wisconsin from California should know that U-turns at intersections are not legal! Neither is lane-splitting by motorcycles.
California traffic law is all about traffic flow. Wisconsin has no such goals. Every single small town lowers the speed limit to 25 when you pass through on the state highway. They do this in 10 mph increments, often with signs lowering the speed limit 500 meters apart. If you have Wisconsin plates and you don't slow down, you're probably OK if it's not too blatantly in front of the police. But if you have Illinois plates, be careful because this is a major source of revenue. Anyway, this sort of thing is not allowed in California; Caltrans requires some kind of safety reason to lower the speed limit or put up a stop sign or signal on a state highway.
Wisconsin also hasn't gotten around to using symbols for highway signs, so you still see "NO RIGHT TURN" where most everywhere else in the world has the arrow with the NO symbol through it. In many cases, this is because the signs here have been up since before I was born. They were built to last, it appears. Another quirk of traffic in Wisconsin is the "RIGHT TURN NO STOP" intersections where there is a stop sign for traffic that goes straight, but not for traffic that turns right.
It's funny that I find the rules of the road that I learned when I first learned to drive to be quirky.
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