Sorry Sanral – you are doing it wrong
JOBURG - I got my first e-toll bill last week. The problem was, the photo attached to the bill was most definitely not the car I drive.
When the next bill came in, there was no photo – raising the question: does the roads agency really expect me to pay, when I know it wasn’t my car that drove through the dreaded gantry?
Residents from around Joburg feel the same. When someone tries to query the bill, they are met by long lines, incompetent staff and an unpleasant experience.
Soon after Sanral’s envelopes started clogging my postbox, the smses came. ‘If you don’t pay within X amount of days, you will lose your 50 percent discount’ or, ‘You will be handed over to debt collectors.’ Sanral has taken their intimidation tactics to the extreme – and I for one am not buying into their nonsense.
Whether a motorist is for or against the tolling system is their prerogative, but having a debt added to your name – when you were not the one responsible for the fee – is completely unfair. Using gantries in a country where number plates are so easily cloned was a dumb idea. Sorry Sanral, but this really should have been thought through a little more.
The time and money it is going to cost to try prove which gantries are the ones I drove under, and which gantries are the ones my car’s (licence) clone drove though, is a joke. Joburgers are busy people. They don’t have time to take their dog to the park, but now they are expected to fight a system they a) do not want, and b) have no control over.
Yes, if motorists bought e-tags this would not be such an issue – but what if we don’t want e-tags? Motorists have rights and those rights are being abused by a system that is fast becoming a complete mess.
