Here’s how many people say they will never pay for e-tolls

The Gauteng City-Region Observatory has released its Quality of Life Survey for 2018.

Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO) executive director Rob Moore said the release of the survey’s findings show that satisfaction with government has improved since the last time the survey was run in 2015/16, in particular with the provincial government.

“Some 44% of residents are satisfied with provincial government, compared to 39% in the 2015/16 survey,” Moore said.

“While this might seem low at first glance, the recent increase in satisfaction with provincial government is significant, and this sphere now commands more satisfaction than the national government, which stands at 43% satisfied, and local government at 38%.”

E-tolls

One of the key focuses of the report, which interviewed 24,889 respondents, was on the highly contested issue of e-tolls.

In both the 2015/16 and 2017/18 GCRO Quality of Life surveys, respondents were asked the extent to which they agreed with the statement ‘I will never pay e-tolls’.

Of respondents who use the freeways in the province in both surveys, just over a third agree that they would never pay e-tolls.

The 2017/18 survey found that over half of respondents say that they would pay e-tolls.

This means that the proportion of respondents willing to pay e-tolls increased by 10% from the 2015/16 survey, with an associated decrease in those who said they neither agreed nor disagreed with the statement.

During his maiden mid-term budget speech, finance minister Tito Mboweni called on Gauteng motorists to pay their outstanding bills, ‘because nothing comes for mahala (free)’.

He said that the e-toll project’s debt had ballooned to over R40 billion, and that money had to be paid. While the flaws of e-tolls are widely known by now, and alternatives were being looked at, the user-pays principle that e-tolling represents is the standing policy.

Read: Transport minister Blade Nzimande says e-tolls won’t be scrapped