adminPRETORIA — The South African National Roads Agency (Sanral) has the capacity and ability to manage and implement e-tolls in Gauteng, which motorists will start paying from 3 December, Transport Minister Dipuo Peters said in Pretoria yesterday.
Ms Peters thanked the 707 000 motorists who had already registered for e-tag accounts and warned other road users who had not registered that they would not qualify for the range of discounts on the affected freeways.
Sanral CEO Nazir Alli said the agency’s studies in recent months on the traffic passing under the gantries on 201km of the province’s freeways showed that 84 percent of road users would pay less than R100 a month to use the roads.
Sanral needed e-tolling to begin before April next year or it would have risked a downgrade of its credit rating. The agency is already on a downgrade watch and its debt of about R39 billion is just one notch above junk status.
Ms Peters on Wednesday reminded Gauteng residents of the high levels of congestion on freeways before road improvements were made, and the cost to the economy associated with people being stuck in traffic and late freight deliveries.
E-tolling has helped reduce congestion and the “system will also contribute to the fight against vehicle cloning because the technology picks up and reads car registration details”, she said.
Ms Peters said the fact the government had cut tariffs from 66c/km to 30c/km for light vehicles registered with an e-tag account was “an indication that indeed this government cares for its people and has listened to the concerns raised by the public”.
Mr Alli said yesterday that a debt collection process had been started. Motorists would be sent a bill after seven days. If they ignored repeated reminders to pay, they would receive a summons.
Government-owned vehicles were not exempted from e-tolling, he said.
On Tuesday, Mr Alli told Business Day that new legal challenges to e-tolling — by the Freedom Front Plus (FF+) and the Democratic Alliance (DA) — were “politically opportunistic”.
Mr Alli said it was unfortunate that the parties had chosen to “politicise” the toll roads by launching separate legal challenges.
“The fact is that three courts have ruled in favour of Sanral and these guys (the DA and FF+) are not showing respect for any previous judicial pronouncements on this matter . . , we can read in between the lines as to why they are doing this now; this is beyond delivery of infrastructure,” he said.
“If we don’t start by April it will be a problem, not only for Sanral . . . we are already on a downgrade watch from Moody’s . . .our bonds will become junk bonds, that is how precarious it is.”
Mmusi Maimane, the Democratic Alliance’s Gauteng premiership candidate, said on Tuesday the party would declare a provincial referendum on e-tolling if elected into power in the province in 2014. —Bdlive.
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