By Sheree Russouw
YOUR bad driving will soon start counting against you - literally. The national Department of Transport is planning to get tough with South Africa's bad drivers and by next year, it hopes to have set the wheels of its new demerit points system in motion.
Every driver in the country will be given 12 points; for each traffic violation they commit, drivers will lose some of them. Violations will be categorised as offences (the most serious), major infringements and infringements. Once your points have been whittled down to zero, your licence is immediately suspended and it could take three years before you are allowed to drive on South Africa's roads again.
"We need to get people to understand the traffic laws and this system is the way to do it," says Thabo Tsholetsane, the acting director of land, transport infrastructure and operations at the department. "People don't care about paying their traffic fines and they think they can just get away with being bad drivers, but they can't."
Offences,[click here for a Word document listing offences], such as exceeding the speed limit by 50 percent or driving recklessly, exact the highest toll and take four points from you. You will be sent straight to court without the option of paying a fine. A major infringement is regarded as not notifying authorities of a change of address; it equals three points and you will be fined. Infringements cost one point and include driving without a seatbelt or not reporting your vehicle stolen.
For every three months that your licence is suspended, you will earn back one point. You will only be allowed to drive once you have recovered all of your original 12 points - a three-year wait. And repeat offenders - those whose licences are suspended three times - face the prospect of losing their licence forever. "Those people will have to redo their learner's test and their licence," says Tsholetsane.
Transport minister Dullah Omar has said that the aim of the system is "to take reckless, illegal or fraudulent drivers off South Africa's roads". But while the department first punted the idea as far back as 1997, it has had "hiccups" in finding a suitable company to design the information technology that will be used to drive the demerit system.
The financial and administrative engine of the new system, the Road Traffic Infringement Agency (RTIA), still has to be created. It will run and manage a database of traffic violations and will collect fines. If you pay your fine within 32 days, you will get a 10 percent discount. If you don't pay your fine, you will have to deal directly with the agency - and you will pay for it.
It will issue you with a courtesy letter reminding you to pay your fine, and will charge you for the courtesy. It costs R75 to have the letter posted to your home. If it is hand-delivered, it will cost you about R225. Should you ignore the agency's reminder, it will send you an enforcement order, which will remind you that you have seven days to pay.
If this order is served by post, it will cost you R100, but if it is hand-delivered, it will be more than R200. If you still don't pay your fine, a warrant of execution is ordered. This empowers the agency to go to your house and seize any of your possessions to recover the cost of both the traffic fine and the written correspondence it has sent you.
"The purpose of the legislation is not just to make money but the primary aim is to change the mindsets of drivers," says Tsholetsane. "If you keep committing offences, you will have to pay. Of all the traffic fines issued now, something like 22 percent of people pay. This system will force people to pay their fines."
He says that a pilot project is planned in Pretoria later this year to test the efficiency of the system. "The aim of the pilot project is to see whether our system will be able to cope with automatically issuing notices and warrants for people to pay their fines. But Pretoria's drivers will not be on the point system yet. That will only be rolled-out nationwide once all of our hiccups have been sorted out "
He adds that a further aim of the point system is to keep people who have not paid their fines out of South Africa's overcrowded prisons. "Our prisons are too full to take more people. We are also taking the prison situation into regard. If there are 126 000 taxi drivers, we can't take 26 000 bad and unrepentant ones and put them in jail."
The City of Johannesburg has welcomed the proposed system, according to Abe Cronje, the data manager in the licensing and prosecutions department. "It will help us because so many people are not paying their fines and they are getting away with it. "They don't tell us they have changed their address, or they give us false addresses. It wastes our time and our resources."
