Skip to main content

E-tolling for South Africa’s Gauteng Freeway improvement project

Following a series of consultations with stakeholders, South Africa’s Inter-Ministerial Committee on the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project (GFIP), led by Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe, Cabinet, has recommended that the South African National Roads Agency Limited (Sanral) should proceed with the implementation of an e-tolling system.
October 29, 2012 Read time: 2 mins
Following a series of consultations with stakeholders, South Africa’s Inter-Ministerial Committee on the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project (GFIP), led by Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe, Cabinet, has recommended that the South African National Roads Agency Limited (2161 SANRAL) should proceed with the implementation of an e-tolling system.

Stakeholders came to the agreement that the tolled roads have improved, and travelling times have been reduced.  Most agreed on the user pay principle and that the e-toll system should be part of a mix of mechanisms employed to address the problem of congestion, as well as to raise funding for the construction and maintenance of freeways.

The project is to be implemented within a broader context of improvements to integrated public transport and improvements to non-toll alternative routes.

Discussions on toll payments, including the use of a fuel levy, came to the conclusion that an e-tag system would provide users with the lowest possible toll fees. The government has proposed that toll fees for e-tag users be capped for light vehicles; monthly toll caps for e-tag registered heavy vehicle users are also introduced.

The government is confident that the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project is an important contributor to keeping South Africa's economic hub moving.  The country's first multi-lane free-flow toll system using Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) will provide road users with a smoother and safer journey.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Need for standardisation of toll classes
    March 2, 2012
    In a previous article Bob Lees of Idris Technology Ltd looked at the appropriateness of toll classes in relation to all-electronic toll fee collection. Here, he looks at how addressing classification standardisation could avoid downstream aggravation and cost
  • Counting the environmental costs of ITS deployment
    October 29, 2015
    David Crawford looks at the latest thinking about calculating the benefits associated with the environmental side of ITS schemes. The penny is dropping that some environmental costs “are being shifted outside the traditional bounds of evaluation methods” for ITS-based road transport projects, according to researchers at the UK University of Leeds’ Institute for Transport Studies.
  • US ushers in reforms with new transportation bill
    November 9, 2012
    On behalf of ITS America, Paul Feenstra maps out implications and opportunities for the ITS industry. A critical milestone was reached last month when the US Congress passed, and President Obama signed, legislation reauthorising the nation’s surface transportation programmes, breaking a nearly three-year log-jam which had stymied critical transportation reforms and delayed much-needed infrastructure projects. The law, numbered P.L. 112-141 but known as MAP-21 (Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century),
  • Interoperability: towards the new frontier
    October 22, 2018
    After six years of intensive research, testing and negotiation, the US tolling industry is well on its way to groundbreaking results in the effort to establish regional - and eventually national - toll interoperability, says IBTTA’s Bill Cramer. Interoperability has been a high priority on the US tolling industry’s agenda for more than a decade. But several factors made it a uniquely complex issue to resolve - including the number of agencies involved, the significant investments those agencies had already