Call for South Africa’s new traffic fine laws to be scrapped

The recently introduced Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences (AARTO) Act is unworkable and should be scrapped, as the law signed in 1998 shows no signs of being implementable.

This is according to the Managing Director of Driving.co.za, Rob Handfield-Jones, who believes it should be replaced with targeted legislative improvements aimed at easing judicial workload and promoting compliance with traffic laws.

The driving specialist noted that the Department of Transport stood poised to miss another launch date, this time on 1 July 2026.

Handfield-Jones explained that at the time of the AARTO pilot project launch in 2008, ten years after it became law, a new dawn of traffic enforcement was promised.

“Instead, the project has repeatedly misfired and become yet another failure by the government to run the basic systems which underpin the rule of law,” he declared.

Shortly before the official AARTO launch, Handfield-Jones noted that there was still no sign of the proclamations needed to roll out the system, nor of the AARTO Regulations.

At the time, the rollout faced fierce opposition, with the South African Local Government Association (SALGA) filing an urgent Pretoria High Court application to stop the launch.

The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA) has also been critical of the rollout, highlighting the South African Post Office as a weak point in the AARTO ecosystem.

Handfield-Jones stated that the Department of Transport has run out of road, even with the AARTO regulations posted ahead of its launch; he noted that companies were expected to analyse and implement them in a single business day.

He added that AARTO became law so long ago, in 1998, that many people who were born that year now have children of their own attending school.

“Government cannot continue to masquerade as if it has either the competence or capacity to implement this decades-old system,” he declared.

Two approaches suggested instead

Handfield-Jones said that a new path should be charted consisting of two approaches, including scrapping the AARTO Act and digitising road traffic law enforcement.

His first suggestion is to repeal the act and legislate a streamlined new approach to enforcing traffic law, with all the benefits of the existing act without any of the complications.

This proposal, based on the way administrative traffic systems and demerit points are implemented elsewhere in the world, has been submitted to Parliament.

Additionally, his other proposals for this approach include amending legislation to provide for constitutionally sound electronic service of notices and summons.

He suggested amending the National Road Traffic Act and Regulations to provide for demerit points for traffic infringements and electronic driver contact details.

This suggestion also included placing the management of traffic violations in the hands of the Road Traffic Management Corporation. 

Handfield-Jones’s second approach to reworking the AARTO Act was to digitise road traffic law enforcement entirely.

“Let us not waste time on trying to turn licences into phone apps,” he explained.

“We should instead use the long-proven means of fingerprints to allow law enforcers to positively identify drivers at the roadside, and registration plates and VINs to positively identify vehicles.”

He added that government departments have been using electronic fingerprint verification for decades, and traffic departments have already used Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) for enforcement purposes.

“The technologies needed to bring order to our roads already exist, and amending the law to make them effective would be trivial,” concluded Handfield-Jones.

“The question is whether Parliament will continue to tolerate the Department of Transport’s dysfunction instead of asserting its duty to see to the safety of all road users.”