TOLLING THE HEARTLAND: ETC POTENTIAL IN SOUTH AFRICA

South Africa's modern toll road system has developed during the last 15 years and is now about 950km long, and will be extended to 2100km by the current wave of Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) projects of the South African National Road Agency. Gauteng Province, which includes Pretoria and Johannesburg, is South Africa's economic heartland. Its Department of Public Transport and Roads plans to develop eight new urban motorways in the next 15 to 20 years and upgrade existing and new motorways to electronic toll collection (ETC). The following features of a possible ETC system for national roads were included in Tolplan's socio-economic evaluation of the economic efficiency that non-stop ETC could achieve: (1) coverage of toll routes by ETC; (2) payment enforcement method; (3) modification of existing toll lanes to ETC; (4) system ability to accommodate different ETC equipment; (5) linkage of ETC and credit/fleet card processing systems; (6) economic benefits and costs of ETC implementation; and (7) expected economic efficiency. Initially, a combination of dedicated ETC toll lanes and manual toll lanes will be developed in Gauteng. It will then be possible to upgrade these toll plazas to dedicated ETC in the fast lanes and eventually to multilane free-flow tolling.