PIC, RIP

I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised in April when I heard that the Alberta Motor Transport Association (AMTA) pulled the plug on its support for Partners In Compliance (PIC). The program promised incentives for trucking companies with exemplary safety practices. It was too good to last.

The idea was for government to let fleets police themselves and then reward them for doing things right. Established as a pilot project in April 1995 by Alberta’s transport ministry and the Alberta Trucking Association (the predecessor of the AMTA), PIC inspired the belief that government didn’t have to rely on a conventional and costly big-stick approach to enforcement, and that truckers would voluntarily comply with existing rules, but at a very high level, in exchange for benefits that could make them more productive or profitable.
Welcome to my fool’s paradise; plenty of truck parking.

The first sign of trouble with PIC’s market-based approach was quick and predictable: no carrier was winning new business based on their participation in PIC. Bottom-line benefits needed to come from the province. Among the suggestions: lower vehicle registration fees, allowing only PIC fleets to bid on government contracts, and exemption from IRP and IFTA audits, as well as from filing insurance and inspection forms.

The carriers wanted a real payoff for their extra work and contribution to safer highways. The standards were pretty tough: For instance, a PIC fleet could have no more than one reportable accident per million miles in city areas, and 0.3 accidents per million miles in non-urban areas. They had to file monthly reports to prove it.

At the larger carriers, it was one more mundane admin job for the compliance department. For the smaller fleets, where the compliance department might also be sitting at the dispatch desk or chasing down a cheque from a customer, it was one more job, period. In any case, there was little to show for the effort.

“Being in PIC should have its privileges,” says Tom Kenny, general manager of Westcan Bulk in Edmonton and president of the AMTA. “We threw some valuable resources at that program, trying to make it work. But we couldn’t even get a scale bypass.”

The challenge facing policymakers these days is not to ask what new regulations the trucking industry needs. It’s to figure out what truckers and government are trying to accomplish, and to find the best way to get it done. Help the province more effectively target enforcement? Reward good-no, excellent-industry practices? Break down the natural tension that exists between regulators, whose work brings control and intrusion, and truckers, who want safe roads but also more freedom to pursue paths to wealth? These things are what PIC was about.

The poster child for the failings of the command-and-control approach to truck safety regulation in this country is the National Safety Code. You have 10 different jurisdictions with 10 different interpretations of how truck safety should be regulated. There’s little if any regard for the market in the way these rules have been drafted, and certainly not in the inconsistent way they have been implemented. Shoot, there are financial incentives to disregard the rules. That is, if you’re not unintentionally out of compliance because they’re so impossible to follow.

PIC should have been a model for others to follow. It could have demonstrated how market incentives encourage people to do the right thing because they’ll earn or save money, not because the law says they have to. Regulations just make you want to find ways to beat the system, after all.

Instead, PIC’s demise reinforces the sad notion that government is content to make and enforce rules by way of reacting to events, not anticipating them. s

Stephen Petit is the editor of Today’s Trucking. You can reach him at 416/614-5826, or stephen@todaystrucking.com.