Plan to avoid long traffic centre queues
THREE new traffic and licensing satellite centres are earmarked for Nelson Mandela Bay in a bid to speed up applications and alleviate long queues at the metro’s two main centres.
This follows complaints by irate residents earlier this week about the long and painfully slow-moving queues at the two main licensing centres in Uitenhage and Korsten.
This week, officials said delays were due to slow internet speed, which connects the machines to the Pretoria Department of Transport.
Safety and security political boss John Best apologised to residents on Tuesday night for the delays, saying technicians were working on the issue.
“When we converted from the outdated live capturing units that caused numerous problems, we became the first metropolitan municipality to be upgraded to the new live enrolment machines,” he said.
“When the other metropolitan municipalities also underwent the same conversion, more machines were added to the network, making the system much slower.
“While a normal transaction would initially take five minutes, it can now take up to 20 minutes to register.”
Since late last month, both Bay centres have struggled with their 11 new state-of-the-art live capturing units (LCU).
The machines are supplied by the Department of Transport, which is also responsible for their maintenance.
The hi-tech machines aim to increase the turnaround time per application to about five minutes.
In September, three new machines were installed at the Uitenhage centre and eight at the Korsten centre.
Before the replacement, the three older machines used to serve about 400 people a day, while the new machines should boost the numbers to 600 a day. Last week, the network connection was so slow that the licensing division was closed for two days while technicians from Pretoria tried to establish the cause.
“We were informed by the Department of Transport that network problems persist between Korsten and the national office in Pretoria,” Best said.
“We negotiated with the national department once again.
“We also engaged with Telkom as the network provider and our IT department to find a faster network con-
nection to address the tardiness of the current system.
“We will not sit back and leave it as is. We will continuously engage with the national department and investigate ways to improve the speed.”
Best said one of the main solutions would be to create branches at the Motherwell Thusong Centre and one other site by May.
Of the three new satellite centres, the Thusong centre would be the only one to cater for all applications except motorbike licences.
The Thusong centre has been accredited by the Department of Transport and the applications for the two smaller centres are in the early stages.
“No transactions other than the renewal of existing driver’s licences will be done at those two points, which means residents will be able to walk up to a live enrolment unit and update their licences,” Best said.
Executive director of safety and security Keith Meyer said the other sites being looked at were in Walmer and Bethelsdorp.
“The aim of expanding these operations is to alleviate pressure from the Korsten and Uitenhage centres,” he said.
“While only some functions will be available at the new centres, it will mean we can focus on increasing service delivery on other aspects such as new driver’s licence applications.
“The bulk of the services and applications will be done at these three new centres, but the actual driver’s licence testing and exams will remain at the two main centres.
“These bookings, however, will also be done through the three new centres.”
The municipality is also looking at an online booking system to avoid lengthy queues and backlogs.
No timeline could be given as to when the machines would be fully functional.