{"id":9735,"date":"2012-04-13T10:37:32","date_gmt":"2012-04-13T08:37:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=9735"},"modified":"2012-04-13T15:25:30","modified_gmt":"2012-04-13T13:25:30","slug":"buying-e-tags-makes-economic-sense-treasury","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/government\/9735\/buying-e-tags-makes-economic-sense-treasury\/","title":{"rendered":"Buying e-tags makes economic sense – Treasury"},"content":{"rendered":"

Motorists do not have to buy e-tags to use Gauteng’s toll roads, but it makes economic sense to do so, Treasury director general Lungisa Fuzile said on Friday (13 April 2012).<\/p>\n

“Whilst it makes economic sense from the individual road user’s point of view to buy the e-tags to save, you don’t have to have a tag to use the road,” he said at the Reuters economist of the year awards in Johannesburg.<\/p>\n

“Therefore Sanral [the SA National Roads Agency Limited]<\/a> does not need you to have a tag in order to track the person down and deliver the bill relating to the use of the road,” he said.<\/p>\n

Motorists will have to pay to use major highways around Johannesburg and Tshwane from April 30, with payment through an automated number-plate reading system.<\/p>\n

A recent march by the Congress of SA Trade Unions<\/a> highlighted opposition to the tolls, which many motorists are threatening not to pay.<\/p>\n

Fuzile said he accepted that there was an argument that some people need to be cushioned from the user-pay principle.<\/p>\n

“But to reject the user-pay principle and expect someone else to pay was ‘bad economics’.”<\/p>\n

“To say ‘phansi with user pay’ [down with user pay]… is problematic. It takes things too far,” he said.<\/p>\n

In London, vehicle users had to pay a congestion charge, just because the roads were clogged, he said.<\/p>\n

The fee had nothing to do with whether the roads were good, or whether the road user was making savings on vehicle wear and tear.<\/p>\n

In South Africa, the roads were good, and road users were getting a good deal.<\/p>\n

Fuzile said that when it was decided to toll the roads to fund the upgrades (in Cabinet in 2007), the economy was doing well and the recession of 2008\/09 was yet to come.<\/p>\n

He conceded that people were now feeling the pinch and that the tolls were hard to digest.<\/p>\n

However, rejecting the user-pay principal was unhelpful and did not make economic sense.<\/p>\n

In his Budget in February, Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan<\/a> announced that drivers of ordinary vehicles would pay 30 cents a kilometre, instead of the original 66 cents.<\/p>\n

Fees would be capped at R550 for frequent users and taxis. Other accredited public transport providers would not have to pay the e-tag fee.<\/p>\n

Heavy vehicles will would get a 20 percent discount if they travelled off peak.<\/p>\n

Gordhan allocated R7.57 billion to Sanral for the financial year towards the R20 billion debt it had incurred to upgrade the roads.<\/p>\n

“We are convinced that this is actually a good deal, and therefore it doesn’t require a contingency. Plan A is Plan B and vice versa,” said Fuzile.<\/p>\n

After his address, he presented the Thomson-Reuters Economist of the Year Award to Dennis Dykes, chief economist at Nedbank.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Motorists do not have to buy e-tags to use Gauteng’s toll roads, but it makes economic sense to do so, Treasury director general Lungisa Fuzile said on Friday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1969,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[25,1912,427,1650,429,2342],"class_list":["post-9735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-government","tag-active","tag-e-tag","tag-e-toll","tag-e-tolling","tag-sanral","tag-treasury"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9735"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9735\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9737,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9735\/revisions\/9737"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}