It’s very likely that Gauteng has not repurposed its e-toll gantries for speed limit enforcement because it is not technically capable of doing so.
This is according to Driving.co.za managing director Rob Handfield-Jones, who recently put forth his theory on why the province has yet to deliver on its proposal introduce new speed cameras on its highways.
The electronic toll collection process, commonly referred to as “e-tolls,” was officially shut down in 2024 after years of boycotts from motorists who refused to comply with the system.
The project, which installed expensive gantries over Gauteng’s major roads to bill motorists passing under them, was viewed as an overreach of the government to tax motorists who already pay several taxes to use the road, both directly and indirectly in the form of fuel levies and other costs.
According to the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse, the failed e-toll system cost the country roughly R24 billion over a 24-year period.
This debt is now a major problem for Gauteng and South Africa as a whole, as both the provincial and national government are on the hook to pay off the enormous sum.
However, there is also a more immediate issue in the form of the now-defunct e-toll gantries, which exist as a white elephant reminding motorists of the disastrous programme.
To fix this problem, the South African National Roads Agency (Sanral) and the Gauteng Provincial Government (GPG) proposed that the gantries could be converted to serve as average-speed-over-distance (ASOD) enforcement.
After the cameras and RFID readers were disconnected from the e-toll billing system in May 2024, the gantries and their backend systems were handed over to the GPG.
In September that year, Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi told EWN that the GPG had made the cameras part of its CCTV portfolio.
He said the cameras already had technology that allowed them to track speeding and lost cars, and that the government and local law enforcement had been given access to the system’s command centre.
However, the GPG has since gone quiet on its plans to use the gantries for ASOD and crime tracking activities.
Sanral has stated that the cameras are still recording vehicles for “road safety purposes” but not for speed limit enforcement.
Handfield-Jones recently told MyBroadband that the holdout on any announcement of ASOD capabilities suggested “insurmountable” technical issues with repurposing the cameras.
One of his sources revealed that the reason Sanral failed to prosecute e-toll defaulters is because the gantry cameras had not been certified for many years.
In 2015, the FF Plus submitted a complaint to the National Consumer Commission that e-toll cameras were not calibrated or certified for use as speed cameras, as is required by the Legal Metrology Act.
This came after the political party received confirmation from the National Regulator for Compulsory Specifications (NRCS) that the equipment was not certified.
A non-starter
Handfield-Jones stated that the cameras were eventually regularised in line with the Legal Metrology Act.
However, their technical ability to serve as speed cameras is still questionable.
He gave an example of a high-profile case that occurred after the regularisation, where the cameras’ data proved useless for ASOD purposes.
Back in February 2014, a prominent politician’s son crashed his Porsche into a minibus taxi on an e-tolled highway in Johannesburg, killing one of its passengers.
The prosecutors requested access to the e-toll data to find the time stamps for when the Porsche passed between gantries, which they planned to use to determine whether the driver was speeding at the time of the accident.
The data was unusable, as one gantry wasn’t recorded and the others had impossible timings.
The driver was later found to be not guilty of culpable homicide, as there was insufficient evidence to prove he was driving negligently at the time of the incident.
Should Handfield-Jones’s assessment prove to be correct, the GPG will be unable to use the gantry cameras for speed limit enforcement and revenue collection.
It’s possible that the system’s failings may not be the result of the cameras, but rather the software behind it.
The original e-toll contract, which involved the Austrian firm Kapsch TrafficCom AG, did not include payment for ASOD enforcement.
The contract lapsed in 2024, which means the software for automatically recognizing number plates for e-toll billing may no longer be available to Sanral or the GPG.
Obtaining new software is likely to come at a substantial cost, which would need to be weighed against the potential traffic fine revenue.
Loading ...
