What South Africa can do with its e-toll gantries — including making R14.9 million per day from speeding fines
Gauteng’s 43 e-toll gantries might not be the boon to law enforcement that some hope, although they could still be used for traffic enforcement once the e-toll system finally gets shut down.
About two months before finance minister Enoch Godongwana and Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi confirmed that e-tolls would be scrapped, the South African National Roads Agency (Sanral) published a tender for a contractor to take over the system.
Among the possible services that bidders could implement was an average speed-over-distance system.
The road agency said its e-toll gantries were already capable of limited average speed enforcement.
“The [average speed over distance] system will interface with the Sanral accounting system to raise any potential invoices for payment of the part of the fine that is agreed to be due to Sanral,” the agency stated.
Sanral has been collecting average speed data since 3 April 2020, and had recorded nearly 12.6 million infringements by the time of the tender publication.
That worked out to roughly 14,858 infringements per day if measured up until the end of July 2022.
With a minimum speeding fine of R1,000 in Gauteng, not accounting for early payment discounts, the system could not only help curb speeding incidents but also generate revenue of R14.9 million per day or R5.7 billion per year.
That could have paid for the original R20 billion cost of the e-toll system within four years.
On a single day in July 2022, it noted 16,225 speeding infringements, Sanral stated.
Average speed enforcement is relatively simple as it does not require any speed measuring equipment, although it does need the precise time at which a car passes through the gantries.
If the precise time isn’t available, the gantries must all still be synchronised to the same clock.
Gauteng E-toll gantry at night
Some organisations — including the Automobile Association of South Africa (AA) — have asked whether the system could have more elaborate use cases, like assisting in proactive crime fighting.
AA spokesperson Layton Beard told MyBroadband the benefit of average speed protection was limited because a speeding motorist could just stop at a fuel station for a few minutes to throw the calculations off.
But the AA contends the fact that the e-toll system could capture vehicle licence plates meant they could likely be used in combatting crime.
In addition to reading e-tags with transponders, e-toll gantries were fitted with specialised cameras to read the licence plates of cars without tags.
In theory, that data could be used by law enforcement agencies to track down vehicles of interest that might have been hijacked, stolen, or otherwise used in criminal activity.
A good example of a system currently doing this is Vumacam’s vast pole-mounted CCTV network in Johannesburg.
What makes Vumacam so useful is its software that can read licence plates on vehicles of interest with high accuracy and responsiveness.
Because it communicates via Vuma’s high-speed, low-latency fibre network, private security companies that use the service can quickly pick up when a vehicle of interest enters a particular area.
Vumacam mast with CCTV cameras
However, capturing and quickly sending information to a control room would not have been a required use case when the e-toll system was designed.
According to FirstCar Rental, it currently takes Sanral three days to process e-toll transactions, suggesting a much slower turnaround in information delivery.
Therefore, the system would likely require upgrading or augmentation with similar software that Vumacam or other intelligent CCTV systems use to allow for near-real-time responses.
That being said, Vumacam is not currently used in environments where thousands of cars can move through during peak traffic at high speeds — like the highways over which the e-toll gantries are placed. Doing so would likely require a lot of processing power.
The fact that e-toll cameras are not known to have been used for crime-fighting in the past suggests that the system does not currently support this.
However, it could still be used for police investigations at a later stage as evidence in court.
Civil engineer Madute Rapulane has also pointed out that Sanral already has advanced monitoring systems on high-traffic routes that fall under its jurisdiction.
“All Sanral roads which have high traffic volumes have a very extensive surveillance system — fully-equipped with CCTV, their own power grid, fibre optic network and a fully staffed team at their traffic management centres,” he said.
Rapulane said this formed part of Sanral’s Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) network.
“ITS measures and records accidents, travel times during congestion, or if there is an accident or car on the shoulder,” he explained.
The system also reports its calculations on travel times during congestion via the large electronic boards next to Sanral roads that say how long it might take to reach an off-ramp to the next major route.
While it’s possible that this system could help with tracking vehicles of interest, the cameras it uses don’t seem to monitor or record at a quality that makes it possible to read licence plates.
That suggests that manual human monitoring would be necessary to identify such vehicles using other indicators — like the car’s colour, design, or behaviour.
That increases the risk of human error and can cost valuable seconds when tracking down criminals.
E-tolls stubbornly stick around
Beard said it would be a shame if the e-toll gantries could not be repurposed beyond what they were originally intended to do.
Outa’s executive director of accountability, Stefanie Fick, told MyBroadband that she was unsure whether the e-toll cameras were suitable for crime fighting.
But she also pointed out another problem — e-tolls could stubbornly stick around for much longer despite promises that the scheme would be shut down.
No funds have been allocated to settle the e-toll debt in Gauteng’s latest annual budget. It is also unclear where the province will get the money for this.
Gauteng is expected to take on 30% of the e-toll debt of R47 billion, while the national government will foot the bill for the remaining amount.
Gauteng finance MEC Jacob Mamabolo said that a memorandum of understanding between Sanral and the provincial government was still being drawn up.
Unless there is an unusual intervention, it is unlikely e-tolls will be scrapped until the next financial year, starting in April 2024.
Until the e-toll system is deactivated, motorists who want to use their e-tag as a convenient way to travel through long-distance gantries still have to pay their Gauteng e-toll fees.
While removing the tag while driving around in Gauteng is possible, the system will still be able to link their number plate to their accounts.
Loading ...