OTTAWA — Transport Canada is looking for motor carriers to participate in a project to measure queuing times at ports, wait times at border crossings and travel times between major cities and along major trade corridors.

Transport Canada would use data provided by carriers to help it evaluate major infrastructure projects.

The data that Transport Canada would like to collect includes, origin and destination, date and time of departure and arrival, total distance traveled per trip, truck wait times at terminal gates and border crossings and turn-around times at terminals and the border.

There is no cost to participating carriers and no follow-up meetings once a carrier has agreed to participate in the project. In addition, Transport Canada will sign a confidentiality agreement with participating carriers, to ensure that the data remains anonymous with no access to anyone outside Transport Canada staff.

Transport Canada will aggregate the data that it collects and uses so that no fleet can be identified. Only Transport Canada staff will have access to the disaggregated data. The confidentiality agreement will protect participating carriers from such things as Access to Information requests by the public.

Participating fleets would receive quarterly reports on the aggregated data to use for trip planning and dispatch.

In order to provide this data, carriers should have access to tracking or global positioning systems (GPS). Carriers would transfer the data collected by GPS to Transport Canada, which will reimburse the carrier for any costs incurred for the transfer (i.e., this may represent the hours spent by the GPS service’s IT staff on making the data web-accessible to Transport Canada).

For carriers who are interested in participating and also operate within any of these three strategic points (port, border and major trade corridors) but who do not have GPS equipment, Transport Canada will provide financial assistance for purchasing GPS units (usually up to 10 units, depending on the systems chosen by the carriers).

Financial assistance is limited to the acquisition of new systems and does not cover monthly recurring fees for system usage.

For additional information, contact Warren Smith, project manager for Transport Canada, by e-mail at wksmith@sasktel.net or by telephone at 306-537-7797.