Johannesburg - National Roads Agency (Sanral) has amended regulations to an e-toll act that will make foreign users liable to pay the tolls.
The Department of Transport has issued a notice in the Gazette, amending the e-road regulations and giving the public until December 27 to comment on the changes.
The first amendment is to ensure that foreign users comply with paying e-toll fees. The act describes a “foreign user” as a motorist who is not licensed in South Africa and who uses the e-roads.
The amendment extends the period Sanral has to send an invoice to motorists. The agency had 32 days to send an invoice to the user’s last known address. This has been extended to 60 days.
What has not changed is the seven days motorists have to make a payment before being charged penalties.
The third proposed change was that Sanral, or anyone instructed by the agency, must establish and keep a register to record all transactions of motorists who use the road, including alternative users who are not registered.
Justice Project South Africa chairman Howard Dembovsky said the changes implied that people who have vehicles registered outside the country had so far been exempted from the user-pays principle on the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project.
The third amendment also implied that there was no obligation for either Sanral or its agents to keep a register to record all e-toll transactions by non-registered users.
Dembovsky said that among the comments he would be submitting to the Department of Transport would be questions on what mechanisms would be in place to ensure owners with vehicles registered outside South Africa would comply with the regulations.
“The way we see it, there are only two ways to ensure that this happens. One is to detain and prohibit them from leaving the country without (having paid) their e-tolls and the other is to seek extradition orders for foreign vehicle owners who don’t pay within 120 days of passing under a gantry,” Dembovsky said.
News of the Gazette notice comes a year after e-tolls were launched in South Africa.
On yesterday’s e-tolls anniversary, marking a year since the e-toll system was introduced, Dembovsky described the system as something that was “stillborn”, failing to materialise into the masterpiece everyone was told it would be.
He said compliance remained low and few outside the realms of big business and the government had registered and were paying Sanral.
Opposition to Urban Tolling Alliance chairman Wayne Duvenage said South Africa was suffering from a power failure, and not just one implemented by Eskom, but by an out-of-touch leadership that believed power equated to authority.
“In the case of e-tolling, those in power believed that by passing a law and forcing an unjust system onto its people, it would all simply happen, just as Sanral has convinced them it would,” he said.
The Star