Just when we were giving up hope, along comes a working e-government service that people want to use. Booking driving tests online.

For the theory test, e-booking has been available for two years on the driving standards agency's web site, www.dsa.gov.uk. (The site also offers a dummy theory test - a sobering experience for those of us with licences dating from the hand-signals era.)

Remarkably, at least 28% of people taking a theory test now book online. This is almost certainly the highest percentage take-up of any "transactional" e-government service aimed at citizens. It is hard to think of any other service where the percentage choosing the web as opposed to any other channel is in double figures.

This week, the driving standards agency announced that practical tests can also be e-booked. This service has been available without publicity since October. In that time, more than 12,000 people have found their own way to it, representing 7.5% of bookings.

Now that the service is being publicised, the agency expects the number of users to increase rapidly. As everyone taking a practical test has done a theory test first, the online proportion should rise quickly to that of the theory test, and then grow at 1-2% a month. The business case sets out a target of 75% in five years but this could go "a lot higher", says Stuart Leeke, in charge of the agency's internet booking service. Today, 97% of bookings are made by phone.

There's one obvious reason for the rapid take-up: three quarters of people who take driving tests are aged between 17 and 24. They're people who have grown up with the internet and expect to be able to order things online. But the agency deserves credit.

Online booking has been envisaged since 1998, when the company Thomson Prometric Learning was contracted to run the theory test. Since the service went live, it has been enhanced so that candidates can change bookings, cancel them and get refunds.

For the practical test, all candidates need is their driving licence number and credit card number. The site shows a selection of dates and times available and reserves the chosen slot for 15 minutes to allow time to pay. The service is available from 6am to midnight.

Realising that www.dsa.gov.uk is not part of most teenagers' vocabu lary, the team also put a bit of thought into meta tags to make the site easy for search engines to find.

What difference will this make in the wider e-government world? In itself, not much: most people don't expect to take a driving test more than once or twice, and will soon forget the bureaucracy involved. But for a large number of teenagers, booking a driving test is their first personal transaction with government and perhaps the habit of dealing with it online will stick.