E-tolls are going nowhere in South Africa – This is their new job

South Africa’s controversial e-toll gantries are not going anywhere, as the government has found another use for them.

Going forward, the gantries will be converted from overhead tolling booths into security fixtures that will be used to monitor speeding and detect criminal activity in Gauteng.

Finding new purpose

Gauteng’s electronic toll collections (otherwise referred to as e-tolls) were introduced in 2013 as a way for the South African National Roads Agency (Sanral) to fund the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Plan (GFIP).

This entailed the construction of several gantries along the province’s highways, which are equipped with CCTV cameras and other devices to scan the thousands of cars passing under them every day.

Motorists would then be charged for every e-toll they passed, but this system was met with intense backlash from the public with the vast majority of road users refusing to pay the bills that they accumulated on their travels.

The widespread boycott, combined with mounting pressure from civil action groups, ultimately led to the government’s decision to shut down e-tolls in April 2024, but the infrastructure will still be a mainstay of Gauteng’s road network for the foreseeable future.

The gantries have only been delinked for the purposes of electronic tolling, meaning that equipment like the CCTV cameras is still fully operational.

Former Transport Minister Sindisiwe Chikunga announced in February this year that the overhangs will instead be used for “crime prevention“, though she did not elaborate further on what this would entail.

However, a Sanral tender document issued in 2022 suggested that the e-toll infrastructure could be repurposed to serve as average-speed-over-distance checkpoints and a surveillance system for tracking stolen vehicles.

The government has evidently moved forward with this plan, as it recently took over the province’s e-toll CCTV network, something that was previously managed by Sanral.

Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi told Eyewitness News the local government had taken over and integrated Sanral’s e-toll CCTV network in a bid to broaden its crime-fighting efforts in the province.

“We have taken over all of their CCTV cameras. They are part of our portfolio of CCTV cameras. There is some technology that is there on speed and tracking lost cars, we have been given access to that,” he said.

“We have also been given access to their command centre, we have permanent law enforcement agents that are in the command centre.”

The Premier also said that the authorities have been able to clear a backlog of cases since it gained access to the information available on the surveillance system.

TopAuto reached out to the provincial government for more information regarding the takeover, but did not receive a reply by the time of publication.