It is certainly changing the way people think of tax and the government. It will be interesting to see who wins in the end.
Definately, but it’s more than just interesting. If our Gauteng compatriots fail to obliterate the e-toll madness on their side, there is always a chance that it will eventually roll out to include the armgat provinces too.
Rigil
There is little doubt in my mind that other provinces will follow if the government gets away with it in Gauteng.
As it is, in South Africa people have been complaining for a long time that they have to pay twice for everything: you pay taxes for services like health, education and security, but if you want those services delivered properly you have to pay again to have them delivered by private companies.
Now the government has started to make this system official policy: you pay taxes for the upkeep of road infrastructure, and by governmental decree you also pay a private company to do it. Only a question of time before other services will be similarly privatized, and you’ll be obliged by law to take out health insurance (as is the case in America), pay for private security companies etc. etc. In the meantime, you’ll still keep right on paying taxes for these services too.
We can only hope that our current crop of politicians will not decide to slaughter the cash cow once it has been milked completely dry…
Well, there you have it: it’s a done deal:
Highway or byway: Gauteng e-tolls are here
The only hope now is that the system will crash because of non-compliance. That remains to be seen.
Actually, you are paying for the construction and maintenance of public road infrastructure three times: income tax, the fuel levy and now e-tolls.
'Luthon64
fuck
If we work together on this, don’t pay until you get a registered letter, don’t go and get your registered letters and try to avoid the gantries, the system will fail. Will we work together? I doubt it. To avoid the gantries you are going to have to get up 45 min to an hour earlier. People might do that a few times but then they will get lazy. They are going to charge you a lot more if you don’t pay promptly. We are slapgat and, like with the shopping bags, (we all took our own shopping bags when we had to pay for it) we will complain for a while and then we will pay.
I’m of a slightly different bend, go under the gantries, as much as possible: Flood the system.
I hear there are loooong queues at the e-toll offices: I estimate that if 30% buy, the system will kick in (i.e. create sufficient momentum) and function leading to the sheeple following suit
WEAK!
Soon you’ll be able to buy them good as new off Gumtree for tuppence ha’penny.
Rigil
I kinda get the impulse to make jokes about this whole e-toll business but it’s not really that funny.
There is a great deal of misinformation, murkiness and misunderstanding, probably cultivated deliberately, about how it’s all going to work. What is clear enough is that it is a very carefully crafted plan to extort more revenue from the public — by hook and by crook. The scheme cleverly leaves the public with Hobson’s choice. If you register and get an e-tag now, you get reduced toll amounts now but you open yourself up to unscrupulous exploitation in the future because you cannot opt out without breaching the e-toll agreement, thereby opening yourself up to criminal and possibly civil litigation. There are special exemptions and amendments to existing statutes that put you at a serious disadvantage. On the other hand, if you don’t register, your tolls are hugely inflated now. So what do you do? Many people have been frightened by these options, and chosen the ostensibly cheaper registration route without realising the great trap they have been mind-fucked into.
The only sane choice in this instance is to defy the impositions and sly manipulations, despite the potential negative effects of doing so.
And realise also that Gauteng is the test case for the rest of SA. This is the first of four phases in the province; success or failure will determine how Sanral and the govvermint will proceed for the remaining phases, as well as elsewhere in the country. There are e-bull’s-eyes painted on several national roads throughout SA: Cape Town is next on the list, soon to be followed by other major centres like Durban, Bloemfontein, PE, East London, and later medium-sized towns like Welkom and Stellenbosch.
'Luthon64
Very true, we are definitely getting complacent. It fits perfectly the anecdote about cooking a live frog in an open pot by gradually heating the water. The frog doesn’t notice, and makes no attempt to leap out until it’s too late. But drop the live frog into very hot water and, according to the story, the frog immediately hops out and escapes unscathed. So how hot will Joe Soap find this e-toll water? Will he jump or bask? And how about the next, slightly worse thing?
Rigil
Incidentally, how prominent is this tag? Is it visible? Can one go and sit next to the highway (or skulk around the parking lots) and calculate the percentage of e-tagged vehicles for yourself? The number reportedly sold is claimed to be anywhere from 21,000 to 1,000,000 depending on the source!
Rigil
The e-tag holder is white with the orange e-toll logo on it, so it’s very visible. The recommendation is that one mounts it on the centre rear-view mirror holder inside the vehicle’s cabin. I seriously doubt it’s a strict requirement but some sources maintain that direct line-of-sight to the tag (through the windscreen) from the overhead gantry is necessary. Regardless, if many people have registered and got e-tags, very few of them seem to be mounting them after the recommended manner. I think they may be hiding them in their cubbyholes… :
Sanral itself currently claims that 800,000 e-tags have been sold. Yesterday they said it was 735,000. In other news, Sanral said that the last-minute rush entailed 28,000 additional e-tags. And don’t mention the wonky arithmetic. It’s pure magic, see? And ignore that there’s something of a gap between “allocated” and “sold”. Similarly, ignore that no distinctions are drawn among the public-at-large, big transport/haulage/rental corporates and local government. Some of these classes are, by their natures, more compliant (and more exempt!) than others… :
'Luthon64
Oh, good. Then at least drivers will soon get a feel for how scarce or common they really are, in spite of the claimed numbers.
R.
I wonder how hackable they are. I have to guess they take some kind of RFID-alike form. If so, very.
Edit:
Alliance against urban tolling statement at 5pm today that their in-situ electronic sensors confirm 985 322 vehicles passed through William Nicol gantry, only 1339 of them were SANRAL registered with an e-tag.
This is just from a FB page, I don’t have a reliable source for this info yet. However if true, I wonder how many invoices they’ve been able to send out before the next wave comes tomorrow.
And apparently, some people are taking steps to cover up their cars’ number plates so the cameras can’t see them. And this opens up a can of legal worms. The question is this: is a toll road a private road or a public road? If it is public, why can you only use it if you pay for it? If it is private, then on which grounds can traffic cops hang around there to force you to uncover your car’s number plate?
It seems to me that toll roads very dangerously blur the distinction between private and public property. As many in this thread have pointed out, this Gauteng e-toll saga is only the hippo’s ears. If they get away with this, be sure that we’ll be forced at governmental gunpoint to pay twice for ever more and more public services. And be equally sure that the private companies who run those services that we are forced to pay for will be more overseas companies, probably with corrupt connections to ANC politicians.
In the long run it will of course backfire on them big time, but one has to wonder how much harm they are going to inflict on the country before we finally kick them out, and when we do kick them out, whether we are not going to replace them with something even worse (like, for example, a certain champion of the poor with a penchant for red berets and very expensive wrist watches).
Here’s another legal conundrum. If you break the law, they have to prove it was you before they can find you guilty.
E.g. if your car is used as a getaway car in a robbery, they cannot summarily find you guilty of being an accomplice; the state has to show beyond reasonable doubt that you were behind the wheel at the time of the robbery.
So what happens when you use a toll road without e-tag and the cameras take a picture of your car’s registration number? The case ends up in court; you shrug and invite the prosecution to go ahead and prove you were driving the car at the time. At least in terms of any reasonable western law, you are not required to tell them who were driving the car then, if it wasn’t you. The state has to prove its case; you do not have to say a thing.
Well, that’s the principle, anyway. But why do I get the feeling that in this particular case, this central principle of western law - you are innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt - will simply conveniently be ignored? What will happen if a test case goes all the way to the constitutional court?
Super: that’s less than 0.2% tagged. If only half of the untagged can be counted on to resist payment, chaos is surely well on its way.
Rigil