/ 18 February 2014

Parliament, look beyond Sanral input – Outa

The government launched the widely unpopular e-tolls around the economic hub of Johannesburg in December.
The government launched the widely unpopular e-tolls around the economic hub of Johannesburg in December.

The Opposition to Urban Tolling Alliance (Outa) urged Parliament's transport portfolio committee to look beyond the South African National Roads Agency Limited's (Sanral's) input on Tuesday.

"Sanral speaks like a soccer coach whose team has lost 2-0 with an own goal having been scored and finds something positive in the fact that each team scored a goal," Outa spokesperson John Clarke said in a statement.

"Even more comical is Sanral's claim that the number of complaints are a mere 0.3% of the total road users."

This was despite hundreds of thousands of road users not complying with the e-tolling system in Gauteng.

Sanral was expected to brief the committee on e-tolling on Tuesday.

For e-tolling to be regarded as a success by international standards, Sanral needed to achieve compliance levels closer to 90% along with low administration costs, Clarke said.

High potential for failure
Outa was finalising a research paper, which examined the implications of a recent study by University of Pretoria academics Marlene Holmner and Erin Hommes. The paper would spell out the reasons why the e-tolling project had high potential for failure, he said.

"Outa urges MPs to insist that Sanral fully explain why nine weeks after a potentially serious breach of the road agency's online systems, Sanral has not yet established how many user accounts were compromised and why it has neither notified compromised account holders of the crime, nor notified its user-base as a whole that their personal data may be in the hands of cyber criminals," said Clarke. – Sapa