Small Business Stuff Chat about SMME issues

Your Wallet – The Bottomless Pit

It was confirmed in the press today that all major highways around Johannesburg and Pretoria are to be tolled.  The cost has been estimated at around 50c per kilometre for a private car, and “many times that” for a commercial vehicle. If you live in Pretoria and work in the Johannesburg CBD, or vice-versa for that matter, it will cost you about R1000 to drive there and back every working day in a month. 

I don't know about you, but I am becoming heartily tired, to put it politely, of paying for the same thing many times over. If there is one thing that will make me chuff off overseas it is the continual assault on my wallet to buy something I have paid for several times already.

Health, Safety and Security, Education, practically all the public services. We pay for each many times.

We pay through local and national taxation, through fees and levies, through paying for the replacement services that we feel necessary to buy because of the inadequacy of State provided services. There are the hidden costs buried in the price we pay for goods and services as suppliers try to recoup the additional fees and levies they are burdened with.

In this case we pay for the Department of Transport and SANRAL through national taxation and fuel levies every time we fill up at the pump. We pay for local roads through local rates and taxes and licence fees on our vehicles. We pay for Tollcon through toll fees on major roads. Now we must pay again at 50c per kilometer to use roads we have already paid for.

The clear intent is to drive us off the roads onto a public transport service. That might be acceptable if there were an affordable, reliable and safe alternative to the private car, but there is not.

What will clearly happen is that the residents of small towns on the rat runs next to the freeways will see their traffic flows increase exponentially, with the consequent damage to their infrastructure and the quality of their lives. We will see the cost of goods and services increase as delivery companies recoup the additional costs of the road toll.

We will continue to see the great and the good hurtling along the by-now-deserted freeways, blue lights a flashin', comforted by the knowledge that we, the long-suffering taxpayer are once again paying.

I think, as I have said before, that it's time for the villagers to light their torches, pick up their pitchforks and march on the houses of the mighty, if necessary dragging a guillotine behind.

This will be the last straw for this camel.

(Note to self - I must find a course on how to jimmie a transponder.)