The e-toll saga of the South African Roads Agency (Sanral) certainly has reached amazing proportions. There is virtually universal opposition to the concept of the e-tolling of urban freeways, with Sanral desperately trying to fight in favour of e-tolling. Sanral is now looking much more like a political party that an engineering agency.

It is threatening to have legislation introduced to be able to fine motorists who do not toe the line. It also uses silly language like claiming that it is not actually a proportion of the proposed toll money that will go to a foreign country but rather a contractual amount from the ‘Electronic Toll Collection joint venture’. Come off it, no matter which way you look at it, significant cash is set to flow from the pockets of local motorists to Europe.

News agency Bloomberg, which is known for its reliability, reported that the Austrian company which supplied the toll system has stated that it expects to collect something like R700-million yearly over the next number of years. This is apparently about 45% of the annual running costs of the e-tolling system.

Cosatu said: “This news will make workers more determined than ever to fight e-tolling and support the call for an efficient, safe and affordable public transport system.” The bunfights will go on. I am completely opposed to any e-tolling.

But let us move away from the public financial fight at the moment and look at other angles. I find it amazing that Sanral ever came up with this system in the first place. Any group of competent engineers would normally go through a rigorous planning and assessment routine which should have stopped this idea right at the beginning.

Firstly, why on earth build a massively expensive and complex electronic system that they knew would cost hundreds of millions to build and operate, before a single rand actually went to road mainte- nance. This looks to me like the sort of system that would be built in Europe for intentionally optional routes, such as the scenic diversion route or the shortcut route that one would take intentionally, knowing that it would cost a lot.

I recently travelled on such a road near Washington DC. Every day for a few days I travelled into Washington DC with a local resident and we travelled on the normal freeway. Then one day we were running late and he said: “Well, no option but to take the expensive road to gain time.” He then took an e-toll device out of the cubbyhole, switched it on, and took a turn- off onto a road with relatively little traffic. He said he never used the expensive road unless absolutely necessary. He had a choice.

The other crazy thing about the planning of Sanral is that it is as obvious as night follows day that, if the expensive e-tolling comes into operation, thousands of vehicles will not use the freeway but will travel the backstreets instead. In fact, the vehicles most likely to travel the backstreets are the trucks and other heavy vehicles. The freeways were built in the first place to get the trucks and major traffic off the backstreets, away from schools, shops and so on; and also to move vehicles more efficiently in the interests of general economic efficiency. Now Sanral intends to shift a significant proportion of the traffic into low gear, so to speak, and to make them travel longer, more dangerous routes.

Any half-way decent early planning would have exposed this reality. Did Sanral just ignore it, or was its competence so bad that it never came out of the planning system?

Then we come to consider how they are really going to invoice people who do not have e-tags, and who do not have sophisticated bank accounts linked electronically to an e-tag. I find it very hard to believe that a motorist who drives down the freeway with his Lesotho number plates, or plates from KwaZulu-Natal, or the Eastern Cape is going to get an invoice in the post at the end of the month. Even more unlikely is that the motorist will pay it if it were to arrive.

So what other predictable e-toll actions can we see now? Well, no doubt, the criminal market for false number plates will boom. People will register false ownership of vehicles, or false addresses so that any invoice will not be able to be posted to the motorist.

We are also aware that a late decision was that taxis could travel free – so how are they going to determine who runs a taxi? What about office lift clubs? Are they taxis too? What about company-provided transport for staff? Maybe they will be levied at half rate. Sanral has said that one of its objectives is to get traffic off the roads to reduce congestion. Where is this complexity going?

My general point is that the original conceptualisation and project planning of Sanral were abysmal for them to have arrived at this complete mess now. How on earth did intelligent engineers get sucked into this quagmire of confused planning?

Wayne Duvenage of the Opposition to Urban Tolling Alliance said: “This is money that is being extracted directly from the pockets of hard-pressed citizens to improve the profits and wealth of overseas business.”

Right at the beginning, Sanral should have been able to predict that this very statement would be made. It should have predicted much more.