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The Freedom Front Plus today laid a complaint with the Consumer Commission against SANRAL because the agency is continuing to advertise the sale of e-tags despite the tariffs not being fully available yet. According to Adv. Anton Alberts, FF Plus parliamentary spokesperson on Transport, it is a contravention of section 23(3) of the Consumer Protection Act, 68 of 2008, which stipulates that goods and services cannot be offered without a price for it being made available.

“SANRAL has not published all the tariffs for the toll roads. It is not available in any literature or SANRAL’s road boards. There is a tariff calculator on their website but the problem is that the majority of road users do not necessarily have access to the internet. A call to SANRAL’s service centre also did not render any results as they only had the e-tag tariffs available for ordinary passenger vehicles and merely refer people to the website. It is furthermore problematic that the tariff per class vehicle is not set out explicitly. Despite this, SANRAL is advertising on radio that road users can purchase the e-tags for the use of the toll roads. As SANRAL is therefore offering goods without the price of it being properly communicated to the public, it constitutes a contravention of the Consumer Protection Act,” Alberts explained. “We are also meeting with the Commissioner of the Consumer Board, Ms. Mamodupi Mohlala and will pertinently bring this issue to her attention.”

The FF Plus believes that the prosecution of road users who refuse to pay toll fees on the Gauteng Toll Gate Project will probably be impracticable and illegal. According to Adv. Alberts the number of the notices which has to be sent out will be astronomical due to the high volumes of vehicles which make use of the highways everyday. “In terms of section 30 of the Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences Act or AARTO, all notices have to be delivered by hand or by registered post. The costs and pressure on the postal system to send out hundreds of thousands of notices will be enormous and therefore raises real questions about the sustainability of the postal system, especially as registered post has to be used,” Alberts added.

“In addition there are questions about the possible use of the Criminal Procedure Act as an alternative to AARTO, as indicated by SANRAL. The Criminal Procedure Act can however only be used if an offence has been committed. At the moment there is no clarity which criminal offence a road user would have committed if he or she refuses to pay toll fees. This type of non-payment is not clearly defined as an offence in any act and therefore SANRAL will probably have to rely on the common law offences but there is even uncertainty as to which offence would be relevant. Should SANRAL charge people with theft or fraud, it would be ridiculous precisely because AARTO is trying to get traffic offences taken out of the court system. There is of course also no legal certainty that non-payment of toll fees would indeed qualify as such an offence. It means that existing legislation, such as the Road Traffic Act will have to be amended and the Gauteng toll system could be delayed further,” Alberts explained.

This state of affairs serves only as more proof that the implementation of the toll system was never considered properly. The FF Plus still believes that the toll system has to be cancelled and that the existing structure should rather be used for traffic monitoring and management.