Pretoria - All local municipalities, metro councils and provincial traffic authorities have been instructed to be ready for the implementation of the Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences (Aarto) Act by January 31.
The instruction appears in an email that an adviser to the Road Transport Management Corporation (RTMC) sent to issuing authorities last week.
Western Cape transport minister Robin Carlisle however said that municipalities were unable to prepare for it because the implementation agency, the RTMC, was not ready.
The Western Cape government would not hesitate to turn to the courts if the transport minister enforced it prematurely, said Carlisle.
It would be years before the RTMC was ready, he added.
Among other things, he reckoned that there was a lack of clarity about the allocation of costs. He also said that thousands of “representations officers” needed to be appointed before the act came into operation.
They needed to be highly trained and the RTMC was to train them. But who would pay for them, he asked.
Carlisle said the Aarto trial runs in Johannesburg and Tshwane had been a mess. He said the report on the trials had been requested but never received.
The Western Cape was achieving increasing success in combating road deaths through the current legal framework, Carlisle said. He would not allow anything to stand in the way of these initiatives. Aarto had effectively wrecked law enforcement in Tshwane and Johannesburg. At this stage Aarto would contribute to road deaths.
RTMC acting chief executive Collins Letsoalo declined to comment on the instruction from Gerrie Botha, his specialist technical adviser, that issuing authorities should be ready by January 31, as this involved “internal correspondence”.
He said that on March 31 Aarto would come into force – without the demerit system. Letsoalo said the RTMC was ready to apply Aarto, and Carlisle could not speak on behalf of the corporation.
In his view there was no obscurity about the allocation of costs and representations officers would be appointed by the Road Traffic Infringement Agency (RTIA) in good time.
Letsoalo said Carlisle had not need to see the report about the trial runs, but if he requested it as a member of the RTMC shareholders’ committee, he would receive it. He said the RTMC had learnt lessons from the trial runs and would publish amendments to the act in the Government Gazette next week for comment.
Sake24 previously reported that sending the Aarto fines by registered post, as required by the act, pushed up costs for the Johannesburg metro police to such an extent that enforcing the law had become unaffordable. The council had therefore proceeded to send the fines by ordinary post.
- Sake24.com
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