The Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences (Aarto) has been delayed again by seven months.
After several delays and court challenges over the past two decades, the controversial new system to deal with traffic offences was to have been introduced in phases starting on December 1, with the licence demerit points system scheduled to have gone live countrywide on September 1 2026.
Transport minister Barbara Creecy has postponed the first phase from December 1 to July 1 2026 due to some municipalities not being ready.
She said some of the issues identified include the finalisation of training of law enforcement and back office personnel, the harmonisation of the current law enforcement system used by various municipalities and funding thereof.
The new date for the implementation of the demerit system is not known. The department will soon publish the new proclamation with new staggered implementation dates, said transport department spokesperson Collen Msibi.
Aarto is the government’s plan to replace the existing criminal system with an administrative one. With Aarto, drivers will be allocated points for offences and face suspension or cancellation of their licences if they accumulate too many, in addition to any penalty fee payable.
If this happens repeatedly, the licence is cancelled, and the driver must, after a prescribed period, redo their learner’s and full driving tests from scratch.
Aarto decriminalises most traffic violations and subjects them to administrative processes. It does this by categorising road traffic violations as infringements or offences. Infringements (decriminalised violations) are dealt with administratively, and offences are dealt with in terms of the Criminal Procedure Act.
Aarto, without the licence demerit system, has been in operation in Johannesburg and Pretoria but was to have been rolled out on December 1 to apply in 69 municipalities and in the other 144 on April 1 2026.
The AA has criticised Aarto for being geared towards revenue generation instead of road safety, and civil action group Outa unsuccessfully launched a legal bid to declare the act unconstitutional.