E-toll calculator: Add up your nightmare

On 3 December e-tolling commences officially and motorists will have to face the wrath of the 49 gantries that loom over Gauteng’s highways.

On the South African National Roads Agency Limited’s (Sanral) e-toll website a ‘handy’ tool has been incorporated for motorists to explore the different options available to them and the costs attached to this forced financial tyranny.

The e-toll calculator gives motorists the opportunity to calculate the cost of single or multiple trips on weekdays, weekends and public holidays, mode of transport, time of day they will be travelling and then of course whether they will be travelling with or without an e-tag.

Travelling with an e-tag will cost you almost half of what travelling registered for e-toll but without an e-tag will. What the calculator does not tell you is that refusing to register at all will cost you almost three times the regular tariff.

The Record explored the application and decided, in order to give readers a taste, to calculate the costs of four different options for a working person assuming they travel to and from work 20 days of the month and assuming that the motorist access the highway at 14th Avenue at peak times. (See table.)

Those who will suffer even more are people in industries that have to travel indiscriminately, such as sales representatives, who do not always have a set route they follow and often have to go to destinations at the whim of a customer.

To put it into perspective the Record made the following calculation based on certain assumptions. According to the e-toll calculator it will cost a motorist who is registered but who does not have an e-tag R1 373 per month if he travels from 14th Avenue to Atterbury Road in Pretoria for 20 work days a month during peak hour. It is estimated that approximately 300 000 motorists use this road a day. Multiply this by 11,2 months of working and this generates R4 613 280 000 per annum for the stakeholders of e-tolling.

And this is on one stretch of road.

Go to https://tollcalc.sanral.co.za/etoll/ to explore the various options available.