AARTO in serious trouble

JOBURG – “The national roll out (of AARTO) is doomed to failure before it has started.”

These words form part of a summary of an AARTO (Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences) act pilot project status report by the national Department of Transport.

The draft document leaked to the DA, dated 26 July, was intended for “compilation into a combined formal report on critical challenges” facing implementation of the act.

The act was passed by Parliament in 1998. In 2010, the pilot phase was completed and Johannesburg, along with Pretoria, were proclaimed full AARTO sites.

A major challenge to national roll-out was courtesy letters and enforcement orders not being sent out and/or granted.

According to the document, the RTIA (Road Traffic Infringement Agency) must serve a courtesy letter by registered mail to infringers, should they fail to respond to notices within a period of 32 days. The agency must follow up the courtesy letter with an enforcement order by registered mail, after the 64th day, should the infringer still not have responded.

However, “due to severe financial constraints within the City of Johannesburg, there was a period that all Johannesburg AARTO infringement notices were sent by ordinary mail in direct conflict with Section 30(1).”

Due to a lack of funds, no courtesy letters and enforcement orders have been sent out since 22 December 2012, which, according to the document, renders all infringement notices “legally null and void; making all law enforcement fruitless and wasteful expenditure”.

The Metro police’s approximately R64 million expenditure up to the end of June was labelled as “wasteful”, “as the 2.4 million cases mailed out are ‘stale’ or outside the… period as prescribed within the time frames in terms of the… act”.

Cases that could not be complied with would eventually need to be cancelled or withdrawn from the system.

“If this matter is not addressed before the end of July, [Metro police] will be required to stop all law enforcement or to revert back to the illegal process of sending out infringement notices by normal mail.”

Another challenge facing national roll out was the centralised AARTO bank account. The RTMC opened the bank account into which the two pilot sites were to deposit money, but no distributions/reconciliation or transfers of fine income received within Metro police or RTMC have been made since 2008.

A proposed short-term solution to enable the agency to serve letters and orders by registered mail would be a short-term loan to the agency by either the transport department or national treasury.

“The amount required over a… period of 10 months will be… R171 526 000; of which R91 315 000 will be for the serving of letters… and R80 211 000 for the serving of orders.”

The lack of funds “resulted in the process undertaken by the two pilot sites being declared void as a result of not having complied with the act… It will result in imminent collapse of AARTO within Pretoria, Johannesburg and Gauteng… due to the non-financial sustainability position of the RTIA.”

“The reports released today by the DA show (…) that the trial has been a complete failure. To remedy the situation, government must suspend AARTO, shut down the RTMC and transfer traffic policing powers back to the provinces and the metro cities where those powers belong,” said DA transport shadow minister Ian Ollis.