71 per cent remain untagged – Outa

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The organisation used a sample size of 2 700 vehicles, counted during peak hour traffic at nine different on- and off-ramps during early February.

“Outa’s previous research finding on December 12, found that 15 per cent of users had bought into the system, but those were the early start-up days and we knew the number would climb in the first few months, however, with Sanral’s threatening behaviour we expected the E-tag uptake to be much higher by now,” says John Clarke, spokesperson for Outa.

He adds with less than a third of freeway users tagged up at this stage, and slowing, the system is headed for failure, as it has in many parts of the world under even more favourable conditions.

“Clearly, Sanral’s multi-million rand marketing scheme has failed to inspire public confidence in their systems, which, compounded by security breaches, offensive remarks, misleading statements, chaotic billing and erroneous data have done extreme harm to the legitimacy of the system.”

Vusi Mona, spokesperson for Sanral, says that the facts are that they are at almost a million E-tag registrations with a weekly average of new registrations of 35 000 to 45 000.

“This will definitely be higher during some weeks when key account holders come on board. Even more interestingly is that there have been hardly any E-tag de-registrations.”

He says that those that have deregistered are due to road-users who are moving out of Gauteng.

“Our target has always been 1.5-million registrations. This means that we are at 66 per cent, with the number increasing weekly,” says Mona.

He adds that they are also satisfied with payments made by non-registered users.

“We have always trusted that the public will do the right thing and pay.

“This high level of compliance has also meant that we are on track to meet our debt obligations.”