Department of Transport | Radio 94.7 FM

The Department of Transport and the Road Traffic Management Corporation are reviewing South Africa’s current speed limits. The proposed review of speed limits comes after President Cyril Ramaphosa signed the Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences (Aarto) Act into law in August 2019 – introducing a new demerit system for South African drivers.

Speaking to the Weekend Argus, Department of Transport spokesperson Ayanda Allie-Paine said the proposal could see the baseline top speeds across the country’s roads reduced by 20km/h.

This would effectively drop the speed limit on the country’s highways from 120km/h to 100km/h, while the top speeds on main roads would drop from 100km/h to 80km/h.

Speeds in residential areas would decrease from 60km/h to 40km/h.

“Our road safety strategy has considered all these factors. Legislation is being reviewed to address and bring in place an edifice of various interventions to respond
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Over and above their overtime, Road Traffic Inspectorate (RTI) officers used to be paid for callouts to emergencies but the introduction of a new rule on overtime has put a stop to that resulting in minimal to no staff available to attend serious incidents.

This was revealed in a report by The Witness in which RTI is alleged to have known about the imminent violent attacks on trucks at the weekend, but did not put enough officers on the roads because of the clampdown on overtime pay.

The recently-introduced rule says that officers cannot exceed 520 hours of overtime a year. Previously, officers would get paid for callouts to emergencies over and above their overtime payments.

But now there are concerns that there will not be enough officers available for emergencies — especially on weekends.

40 RTI Officers dropped
The report claims that more than 40 officers at the Pietermaritzburg RTI office alone were dropped
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