Sanral vs Outa over e-toll report error
Outa head, Wayne Duvenage says that Sanral’s dismissal of a cost report based on a few select inconsistencies is an attempt to distract from the bigger, more important questions being asked.
Road agency Sanral has slammed anti-tolling group Outa for “misleading the public” with a report on road costs, which claims that the agency was overcharged by 321% in building Gauteng’s freeway project.
The group said that a fundamental figure in Outa’s calculations was simply incorrect, which inflated the group’s calculated costs by as much as 100,000%.
In its report, Outa compared the local costs of constructing 1km of freeway with international standards, citing a Netherlands IMPACT study by CE Delft.
The Outa report stated that the unit figures per road kilometre ranged between €0.52 million for France and €1.1 million for Switzerland – a number which Sanral claims was simply incorrect.
“Outa confuses the unit of measurement,” Sanral said. “It incorrectly extracts construction costs in Europe and bases its calculations on these values in ‘millions’ of Euros instead of the ‘billions’ stated in this study. This constitutes an almost 100,000% error,” Sanral said.
“Based on Outa’s own calculation, but with the correct values inserted (billions not millions), the GFIP freeways are in fact 99,7% cheaper than the comparable European costs.”
BusinessTech checked the original CE Delft report, and found that Sanral’s reading of the text is correct – the figure cited by CE Delft is billions of euros, not millions, as quoted by Outa.
Outa report
CE Delft report
However, in the table following the text, the same report cites the exact same costs in millions of euros, not billions – indicating that there may have been a typo in the original numbers.
Indeed, elsewhere in the same report, CE Delft uses figures far smaller than the ‘billions’ quoted – referring to road construction in hundreds of thousands of euros per kilometre.
Notably, France’s total road infrastructure costs are listed at just over €32.8 billion, making the ‘billion’ reading of the numbers seem off.
World Bank estimates for the average cost of constructing a kilometer of paved road in the early 2000s was at US$1.8 million.
Sanral distracting from the point: Outa
Speaking to BusinessTech, Outa head Wayne Duvenage said that Sanral is trying to dismiss an entire report it disagrees with, on a few select inconsistencies.
He added that Outa would respond to Sanral’s claims soon.
He said that Sanral was trying to distract from the real issue: “The real question – and the whole point of the cost exercise – is whether or not South Africa was getting fair value for its road construction, and we maintain that it is not,” he told BusinessTech.
Regarding the million/billion discrepancy, Duvenage said that paying R18.4 billion (€1.1 billion) for a kilometre of road is unheard of anywhere in the world, and is something which would have been flagged and corrected in the group’s research.
Sanral issued a statement on Tuesday calling Outa’s cost estimation report “inherently defective”, saying that the opposition group was working of old data and estimates and comparisons that are not compatible.
“Outa reached its conclusion before doing its research and millions of commuters are making their decision to pay e-tolls based on false findings,” Spokesperson Vusi Mona said.
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