Two transport economists' recommendation that a kilometre-based road user charge system could be a viable alternative or supplementary source of income to fund the construction and maintenance of roads in South Africa is drawing wide-spread interest.

The South African Institution of Civil Engineering (SAICE)'s Transportation Engineering Division recently awarded the Best paper by a Young Professional (under 35) to Johann van Rensburg for his paper "A kilometre-based road user charge system: Proof of concept study". 

The paper, co-authored by Van Rensburg and his PhD supervisor Prof Stephan Krygsman, both lecturers in the Department of Logistics at Stellenbosch University, was presented at the 2016 Southern African Transport Conference (SATC).

They question the continuing reliance on the fuel levy to generate sufficient income to fund government's general expenditure programmes, including the construction and maintenance of roads, due to a decrease in the average amount of fuel sold per vehicle per annum.

Van Rensburg and Krygsman identified a kilometre-based road user charge system, which is not dependent on fuel sales to generate income, as a viable alternative or supplementary income generating mechanism.

Their premise is that road use can be determined by a fitting an on-board global positioning system (GPS) enabled device to a road user's vehicle. Vehicle movement data can then be collected in order to generate a road use invoice at a set charge per kilometre travelled.

It is the second time that they presented a paper on this topic at the SATC and the second year that Van Rensburg received this award. To their knowledge it is the first time that the same person received this award in two consecutive years.

"Better yet, he received an engineering award. And he is a transport economist," added Prof Krygsman.

Prof Hannelie Nel, chairperson of the Department of Logistics, congratulated Van Rensburg and Krygsman. "The award is an indication of the relevance of the work as well as the quality of the research," she added.

Van Rensburg said it was a big honour to receive an engineering award and agreed that it emphasised the relevance of the subject.

"Last year we argued that an alternative is needed and this year we presented an alternative. It is a hot topic and people are talking about it. There was significant interest in our presentation at the SATC."

Their next step is to test the idea with the public and other roleplayers. These papers form part of Van Rensburg's doctoral research.