South Africa's controversial toll system goes live - but faces serious non-compliance

To be fair, for personal reasons, I have neglected the issue of the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project in South Africa, which undoubtedly has been the most controversial road pricing issue in Africa in the past year. It involves introducing free flow tolling on a 201km network of mostly upgraded and some new highways in South Africa.

Map of entire Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project including all toll gantries

I've written a few articles about this project in the past three years, including noting the risks of non-compliance, when tracing vehicle owners and fining them hasn't been fully developed.

Unfortunately, those risks weren't properly heeded.  I wish I hadn't been right, but I was, there are some serious problems - not with the technology, but with the business processes and preparation for the toll system's introduction.  

You'll find almost all of my articles about South Africa are about this project, by looking at this page and the older articles here (unfortunately I used links to SANRAL - the government's highway company - website for images which are no longer valid).

Tolling was launched on 3 December 2013 and whilst Kapsch, the well-known equipment and system supplier for the scheme, reported that the launch had been a success, there are other stories indicating some nuances to this.   It should, of course, have been technically successful, given the launch date was put back nearly a year.  Given it uses what is now (EU) standard DSRC 5.8GHz technology with ANPR cameras, it would have been a surprise had there been a major failure. 

However, the Times (South Africa) reports that there is a shortfall in revenue of just under R500m (US$48m) from recovery of overdue tolls.   Bills of around R543m have been sent but less than 10% have been paid.  It had cost R50m in debt recovery costs (around US$4.8m), of which R32.8 is postage and invoicing costs (US$3.1m) and the remainder in processing the invoice (from detection to identifying the vehicle owner).  

Therefore, in my view, whilst the on-road systems are working, the customer management function has been disastrous, not because those undertaking it are incompetent, or that the technology is wrong, but because adequate provision was not made for handling the human factors. So, motorists are by and large driving and ignoring bills, and the longer this goes on, the more they are going to do it.

90% non-compliance is astonishing, when it should be the other way around, with 90% having paid and 10% not paying.  It smacks of poor marketing, but also poor planning to manage the initial flood of invoicing.  

I'm far from surprised.   In any new fully free flow system, there are going to be issues of non-compliance, and with so much effort surrounding the countering of bad publicity, it is far from surprising that many motorists are just ignoring invoices.  Frankly, unless SANRAL acts quickly to recover debt and impose penalties (or incentivise a shift to tag based accounts), it faces longer term sustained leakage of revenue.

This is actually quite fundamentally basic policy on toll collection in a fully electronic free flow environment, with the fact this is in a developing country making it all the more difficult.  I am astonished that SANRAL has failed to prepare for this adequately, or that it did not have a contingency for a period of sustained losses whilst it engages in a lot of debt collection and ultimately, enforcement action (for recidivist violators).   In a country without a tradition of free flow tolling, and with issues of traffic law enforcement, it should have been absolutely core to revenue protection to have a strategy for how to deal with large volumes of non-payments.

The Times report states more:

Sanral's billing system has been beset by problems, including failure to provide invoices on time, billing of people who do not own cars and an increase in the displaying of cloned number plates.

Roodt said the high number of outstanding fees could also be indicative of motorists being under financial strain.

"Clearly what is happening here is that the public is not agreeing with what the government has legislated. People could be battling or do not want to follow the government's instructions," he (DA MP Ian Ollis) said. 

Cloning of number plates was foreseeable, but the whole thing smacks of the fundamental problem with implementing electronic tolling in any country - the infrastructure to identify liable vehicles and their owners must be robust.  It typically is not something government agencies are keen to highlight, since they are responsible for it, and tolling contractors aren't specialised in undertaking what is actually a combination of database management and law enforcement. 

When introducing tolls on existing roads the problems are highlighted further, because unlike new roads, motorists are much less likely to simply not drive on them, as their choices are to use other modes, if available and convenient, or not drive.  

According to the Mail & Guardian, there are around 2.5 million monthly users of the road network, with 1.2 million users are registered with tags.  It should have been more like 70% tag use from the start, and the goal must be to get that to around 80% by the end of the year.  Yet apparently even those with tags are not necessarily paying bills, which should be the priority.  If you can't enforce tag account holders to pay their bills, what hope is there of getting others to do so?

It is going to be a hard year ahead, but one that SANRAL needs to grasp - urgently.  It will need to spend millions now to fix this, but it will pay off in the longer term and should be an object lesson in how not to introduce free flow tolling.