AARTO Fleet Solutions

AARTO CONFUSION LINGERS

by Dennis Jackson.

The Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences Act (AARTO) implementation process has once again faltered and the Aarto Executive of the Road Traffic Management Corporation (RTMC) cannot give reasons for this. Transport Minister Sbu Ndebele is expected to announce the implementation date of Aarto during a summit on the initiative next month.

The full roll-out of Aarto did not materialise in March 2010. Although pilot projects were launched in Tshwane in 2008 and in Johannesburg a year later, it led to speculation that the delay was due to in the Road Traffic Management Corporation (RTMC) not yet structured to fully implement the system countrywide.

Executive manager for Aarto at the RTMC, Basil Nkhwashu, previously said that a Summit on the Act would be held around the end of June 2011. However, this did not take place. Conversely, the acting RTMC CEO, Collins Letsoalo was quoted as saying, he had "turned the RTMC around" and it was ready to implement Aarto nationwide. The Aarto Summit was to have taken place in June, but was postponed to July and was then put off until August. It has now been postponed to September, 2011.

Postponing Aarto implementation and no headway being made, will lead to a further loss of credibility along with austere confusion among fleet operators in the industry, not to mention the average motorist. However, transport ministry spokesman Logan Maistry stated that the summit would be held this year, but he needed to make sure that all stakeholders were involved.

The demerit system is intended to reduce traffic offences, enhance the adjudication of road traffic infringements and support the prosecution of offences. Conversely, several groups, including the taxi industry and the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu), have called for the Aarto system to be abandoned. According to the Transport Minister this will not happen and Aarto will be implemented.

Aarto is confounding to most South African fleet operators. In fact it affects any entity operating a large or small fleet of vehicles of any size. The consequences of not understanding how the system operates, its financial impact on the company and the ramifications of an entire fleet being grounded is too dismal to contemplate.

The Act could bring the South African road freight business to a grinding halt due to large numbers of drivers receiving demerit points for any number of minor transgressions. Consequently, their driving licences, as well as their businesses' operator licences, could be suspended. This could ring the death knell for a fleet operator who is unskilled in managing Aarto.

Fleet operators need to understand the impact of the legislation to ensure compliance with the requirements of the act and preclude incurring the massive extra costs associated with the incorrect supervision and management of the Aarto system within their fleet.

One of the regulations within the Aarto Act says that when licensed drivers commit offences, they will be fined a certain amount and be allocated a certain number of demerit points, according to the type of offence they commit. This will then be reflected on the National Contravention Register on eNatis.

After 12 demerits are gained, a driver's licence will be suspended.

In contrast to this the MEC for Roads and Transport gave a figure of 380 fraudulent driver’s licences in Gauteng. The reality is that recent conservative estimates place the number of fraudulent driver’s licences in the country at roughly two million. This equates to twenty percent of all drivers in South Africa! The research further identifies 21 Driver Licence Testing Centres (DTLC) as being involved in issuing fraudulent driver licences.

This makes a mockery of the entire driver licencing process and demonstrates the Departments inability to control the licencing procedure. The point at issue here is how will this affect the correct implementation of Aarto, and exactly how will the Agency suspend a counterfeit licence or designate demerit points to such a licence? A thought-provoking question indeed!

The inefficient functioning of Aarto is likely to perpetuate corruption, incompetence and the lack of administrative capacity of the RTMC and consequently many more unlicensed drivers will be on our roads. This will ultimately result in diminished capacity and disorder in Law Administration’s capacity to deliver the desired results in applying the new Aarto system.

This then obligates the fleet owner to adequately educate his staff and drivers. Furthermore to put systems in place to deal with Aarto and streamline the functioning of the fleet in order to ease the administrative and financial burden that could conceivably place an ‘insecure load’ on transportation capabilities.