Outa concerned that e-toll defaulters will be linked to fines management system
The Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences Amendment Bill (the AARTO Amendment Bill) is currently under consideration by Parliament.
Road safety needs urgent help, but the proposed AARTO Amendment Bill is not the answer, says The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa).
The Bill was passed by the National Assembly in September 2017 and is currently going through the The National Council of Provinces (NCOP) approval process.
“Road safety needs urgent help, but the proposed Amendment Bill is not the answer,” said Rudie Heyneke, Outa Portfolio Manager for Transport.
“Outa firmly believes that motorists’ behaviour must be addressed to reduce fatal road accidents. However, our analysis of the amended Bill indicates that it is less about road safety and more about generating revenue through a complicated and administratively unworkable system,” said Heyneke.
Outa noted the concern that unpaid e-tolls may be used to prevent motorists renewing their driver’s licences, leading to people driving without licences.
“We’ve seen this movie before with the e-toll scheme, whereby Government believes that legislative changes are the panacea to their administrative problems and that people will simply fall into line,” said Heyneke.
“When Government behaves in this manner and runs roughshod over meaningful public engagement, or ignores input from the major role players, the scheme inevitably falls apart.”
These are some of the concerns which Outa has with the Bill:
a) The Bill links e-toll defaulters to the traffic fines management system, by making failure to pay e-tolls a failure to obey the road signs which list the toll charges.
This means that every unpaid e-toll charge may be regarded as a traffic infringement and result in a demerit point for each gantry pass.
“Within days, a frequent user of the GFIP freeway will accumulate more than 12 demerit points and will have his licence suspended and ultimately cancelled, as it will not be possible to ‘work off’ that many demerit points. This is a cheap shot by the Legislature to bully motorists into paying e-tolls.”
b) The Bill seeks to move the service of notifications of traffic infringements to electronic format, but this is not practical.
“There may be millions of motorists who are not linked to the Internet or electronic services and the scheme will have to default to serving fines to physical addresses,” said Heyneke.
“While some aspects of the Bill have removed the requirement to serve notifications by registered mail, all changes to a driver’s demerit points must still be served this way, which will be a huge expense, negating one of the key motivations for the amendment.
“There are also a range of other problems with the Bill, including notice periods, fees, legal uncertainty over the Tribunal which must adjudicate thousands of representations and the conflicts arising from these, the cost of rehabilitating habitual offenders, and the removal of the current system of allowing motorists to contest fines at no expense to themselves.
“Outa has made a written submission to the NCOP and given input at recent NCOP public hearings and will continue to engage with the authorities on this Bill.
“We want this law to be workable, practical, unchallengeable and to meet the crucial objective of improving road safety.”
