The gates of the Langlaagte testing station in Johannesburg were temporarily closed on Monday as about 1 500 people waited to register and license vehicles, metro police said.
Johannesburg metro police spokesperson Wayne Minnaar said the gates were temporarily closed at 11am.
A thousand people were inside the station and 500 outside, he said.
”In order to control the situation, we have to temporarily close the gate until we see to all the people on the inside.”
There were still ”teething problems” with the upgraded transport information system, eNaTIS, at vehicle and licensing testing stations in the city, Minnaar said.
The Langlaagte gates would re-open once all people inside the station had been attended to.
”There’s just too many people coming forward to have vehicles registered and licensed because the system was off two weeks ago and last week we had technical difficulties.”
Some technical difficulties remained, he said.
The Roodepoort station was unable to issue drivers’ or learners’ licences due to ”a technical fault”.
The other three stations in Johannesburg were open but the system was slow, he said.
Minnaar said reasons were technical ”teething problems” and a backlog caused by the stations being closed for the installation of the new system.
Tshwane metro police spokesperson Alta Fourie said all Pretoria stations were open but that there were still problems.
These included occasional system collapses and a ”very slow” system, which took up to 20 minutes to assist one person.
”On a national level, they are attending to the problem,” she said.
Vehicle-testing stations, vehicle-registering authorities and drivers’ licence-testing centres were recently closed for the upgrading of the old National Transport Information System (NaTIS) to the new eNaTIS system.
The new service was electronic and meant traffic-related transactions could be done through automated teller machines (ATMs) and the internet. — Sapa