Court bid to stop Wild Coast toll road

Toyota South Africa Motors, the Southgate Business Park and the Umbogintwini Industrial Association have lodged papers in the North Gauteng High Court to challenge the authorisation process of the new toll road, which will rely heavily on funding from Durban road users.

The tolls, the businesses argue, would pose a burden on employees, who would use these roads to commute to work, most of whom were from low-income communities.

In a founding affidavit lodged in court in Pretoria by Aldine Armstrong, a specialist environmental attorney representing the businesses, the three are asking the court to review the decision by Environment Minister Edna Molewa to allow the SA National Roads Agency Limited (Sanral) to go ahead with the toll road, despite vigorous objections, arguing in court papers that a social and economic assessment of the impact that tolling would have on people and businesses in the Durban South Basin should and could have been done prior to Molewa's decision.

"Contrary to various sources of legal and technical advice since 2000", Sanral has "tenaciously refused" to assess the consequences and the knock-on multiplier effect that "burdensome" tolling would have on people and business, the three businesses said, according to Daily News. Such an assessment, they point out, is one of the many processes required to be undertaken under the mandatory environment impact assessment. "Yet Sanral has insisted that such a determination must be left to its sole discretion, and (it) successfully convinced the department to allow this oversight to prevail" and allow the proposed upgrade and construction of the toll road from Prospecton in eThekwini to Gonubie in the Eastern Cape to go ahead.

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