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AARTO
| Date: |
20 May 2010 07:00 |
| Producer: |
Bernadette Cook
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| Presenter: |
Devi Sankaree Govender
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| Researcher: |
Susan Comrie
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| Show: | Carte Blanche Consumer |
South Africa has new traffic laws, and if you're a driver in Johannesburg or Pretoria, chances are you've already been busted by AARTO. It's a mouthful that stands for the Administrative Adjudication for Road Traffic Offences.
Devi Sankaree Govender (Carte Blanche Consumer presenter): 'The new system promises to crack down on speeding and to force the 80% of motorists who don't pay their fines to cough up. But consumers are already falling prey to corrupt cops.'
Although AARTO has been implemented the points system is not yet in place. But cops count on this grey area for extra pocket money. Film location scout JP Viviers was caught talking on his cellphone recently.
JP Viviers: 'He gave me back my licence, he says, 'Go down to the cash point, draw me R200, and come back, deliver, and be on your merry way.''
Devi: 'The minute he said, 'You could lose points,' how did you feel?'
JP: 'It's a bit of a scare. I mean, I do spend a lot of time in my vehicle and I need my car to earn money - its part of my income, you know. If I can't drive a car, I can't work and I can't pay my bills.'
So JP duly drove off to the nearest garage, but about 2km down the road the reality of what he was doing dawned on him.
JP: 'They're there, they know the laws, you abide by the law and that's it. So, if someone with a badge says to you, 'This is what you have to go and do,' before reality kicks in or your better judgement kicks in you're actually thinking, 'Okay, yes sir, thank you for my licence. Bye.' And you run. You know?'
JP called the JMPD before drawing the money and asked for their advice - they told him not to return unless he wanted to get the officers' details to report them. But another motorist we spoke to was so scared he paid up.
'Andrew': 'I was coming up to the intersection with Gordon Road. I was speaking on my cellphone. And I stopped at the red robot and the next thing I knew there was a Metro Police van parked next to me. He told me to pull off around the corner, which I did.'
They asked him to produce his driver's licence and told him that the fine would be R500.
'Andrew': 'So he says, 'No, the points system has been implemented and we're going to have to take points off your licence.' And that's when I got a fright.'
And that's when the officer came up with a 'solution'.
'Andrew': 'So he opened the door and he told me, 'Get into your car,' which I did. And then he placed the clipboard on the open window, holding my driver's licence in the one hand, pen in the other, he rested on the clipboard and just pushed and made a nice little bump [with the sheet of paper]. He said, 'Put your money in there.' So I took the money out of my wallet and I put it in there.'
Devi: 'Had you ever paid a bribe before?'
'Andrew': 'Never - wouldn't have considered it. And I wasn't considering it then until the points was brought up.'
Howard Dembovsky of the Justice Project thinks it spells disaster.
Howard Dembovsky (Justice Project): 'The JMPD have been particularly bad with this already by telling people that the points demerit system is in place and, 'I'm going to give you a fine now and take five points off your driver's licence.' They put the woollies up people by saying, 'I can do that or I can be nice to you... R500 bucks it goes away.''
We wanted to challenge acting CEO of the Road Traffic Management Corporation, Collins Letsaolo on corruption, but despite requesting an interview for two weeks he couldn't make time to see us.
Basically the new AARTO system is meant to make our roads safer and to decriminalise traffic offences and keep them out of court. But it's also created a bureaucratic minefield for motorists.
Devi: 'So how many points do I get? How does it work?'
Howard: 'You start off with zero points and for each infringement you will have x amount of points added to your driver's licence. And you get up to 12. On the 13th point your driver's licence gets suspended for three months.'
Points allocated vary depending on the offence.
Howard: 'Driving 71 in a 60km/h zone, you could lose a point on your driver's licence for that. If you don't come to a complete halt at a stop street, three points. What they call more serious offences, i.e. travelling 25km/h over the speed limit on a freeway, say goodbye to four points.'
The new system will, however, reward good behaviour and if you do not get any fines for three months you will have one point restored. But try and challenge a fine on the new system and you'll find it obstructive.
Howard: 'The system has been put together to encourage people to pay fines, finished. The second you pay your fine the points get incurred on your drivers' licence.'
Under AARTO you'll get your infringement notice in the post and then you'll have 32 days within which to pay your fine at a discounted rate of 50%.
Howard: 'If you have not paid it within 32 days and then what happens is they send out something called a courtesy letter, which is basally your fine without the photograph on it saying that they sent you the fine, your fine has not been paid, it is now 100% of the value and thank you very much we are charging you R60 for this letter.'
Ignore the courtesy letter at your peril - Step 3 in the process is to send an enforcement order charged at R60 and if you still don't pay they will issue a Warrant of Execution.
Howard: 'And that is a judgement, default judgement. And what happens is this now gets handed across to the sheriff who pitches up at your house and says, 'Thank you very much, I'm taking you lounge suite and your TV to pay your traffic fines.''
Incorrect and duplicate fines seem almost impossible to sort out. Nico Dreyer managed to rake up six fines totally just over R4000 for driving 21km over the speed limit on a highway where the traffic department allege that the speed limit is 80km/h.
Nico Dreyer: 'One of the pictures came up and we were extremely lucky there were GPS co-ordinates on these pictures. We put up onto Google Earth and we found these fines were actually onto the N12 going east coming back and not at the Diepkloof interchange, but actually at the Rand Show road bridge.
Refusing to pay, Nico did a representation to prove that the fines were incorrect.
Nico: 'And then we identified a lot of other problems with the pictures as well. To say that anybody in their right mind would have looked at those pictures and scrutinised them before sending them... should have realised there are a lot of other mistakes on those fines that should not have gone through. But, obviously the most critical one is they've trapped illegally; that's a 120km/h zone - it's not 80km/h.'
Howard: 'This happened to at least 10 000 people. In a space of six hours 592 infringements were recorded on one side of the road. They were trapping on both sides of the road.'
Howard is busy planning a class action for these incorrect fines.
Howard: 'You can push this far and no further. We've given them opportunity after opportunity to withdraw this lot; they've decided not to.'
Making a representation to have a fine rescinded means filling in forms and hoping that your case will be dropped. If not - you have to pay the full fine plus a R200 rejection fee.
Howard: 'You want to know how many points are on your driver's licence. You have to go to the licensing authority, fill in a form, and pay a fee to check.'
But there is one way to avoid getting points allocated to your licence - by nominating a driver and paying them to put the points onto their licence.
Howard: 'I say I was not driving my car, okay, Devi was driving my car. Devi is the person who sold me the points because she doesn't actually drive. You understand what I'm saying? It doesn't really matter because they have a whole lot of people who all have zero points on their driver's licence and they sell them up until the time they get to 12. But, once again, it creates a new industry for criminals.'
In the UK drivers pay £100 per point and its likely to happen here too - either that or drivers will lose their licences.
Howard: 'What they are going to get is suspended driver's licences. Sorry, that's what's going to happen. I'm not joking, I think that it will be three, maybe four months, and we will have 75% of our drivers in this country driver's licence-less.'
Despite the fact that it's meant to make our roads safer, Howard isn't convinced that the new demerit system is going to stop the carnage.
Howard: 'There needs to be a complete restructure of how traffic enforcement takes place in this country. The biggest problem that we need to address is this predominance of needing to make money.'
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:While every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, Carte Blanche or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. This transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.
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