‘Roads have never been cheap for the users’

FTW’s Alan Peat believes Andrew Marsay’s comments about e-tolling encouraging a more efficient usage of the public highways seems to miss out on the past history of road reconstruction and maintenance in this country. When any utility that we use is cheap at the point of use, we tend to use it inefficiently, he said. But, when prices are high, we use it more carefully. What he fails to take into account is that roads are not, and never have been, free or cheap for the users. Some 40 years ago, the Nationalist government of the time had a road levy built into the fuel price. This fuel tax – paid by all the road users in the country – was meant to be dedicated to the construction and maintenance of the national system of roads. It was at the beginning, but the Nats quickly found that it was rather a tidy sum of cash which could be deviated to many of the other, sometimes rather devious, purposes they had in mind. And not so slowly it was drained away into these other projects. The roads infrastructure now began to suffer from a lack of funds. So bad was it that a senior official at the department of transport actually warned that – in the next two decades – the roads would become unusable if the funds that were raised for them were not once again ring-fenced for their construction and repair. And new roads would become purely a dream. But the Nats didn’t follow that route. Instead they came up with the idea of the user-pays toll roads system – a concept that has been followed gleefully by the ANC government of today. A similar situation has been played out at provincial level. Money from the licensing of vehicles was supposed to have an element that would be fed into each province’s roads budget. Again, the provinces found other uses for this fund, and road renewal and repairs began to suffer. But we all still pay these sums – and considerable they are. But their original purposes – roads – have been forgotten. So the roads are not free or cheap, they are just going to cost Gauteng – and the other areas that will soon follow the same route – considerably more in e-tolling monies. And who’s to say that it will all keep going to the SA National Roads Agency Limited (Sanral)? It may again attract other uses, and someone in government may have to come up with another way of raising funds that are “dedicated” to roads. Who knows?