CALGARY — An innovative, self-governing compliance program in Alberta once left for dead has been given new life, and a series of improvements should attract more truckers than ever before, says the program’s newly appointed director.

Former Alberta cop and founder of Lyal Customs Carriers Lane Kranenburg was tapped earlier this year by Alberta Transportation and the Alberta Motor Transport Association (AMTA) to fix the beleaguered Partners in Compliance (PIC) program. He’s got a lot of work to do, despite the program’s noble ideals.

Lane Kranenburg wants to reintroduce PIC
under a whole new corporate identity

As Today’s Trucking reported last year, the Alberta government gave the green light to begin retooling the floundering program if the AMTA agreed to give it another shot. Kranenburg’s appointment effectively means that PIC is well on its way to being resurrected.

Established as a pilot project in 1995 by the ministry and the Alberta Trucking Association (the predecessor of the AMTA), PIC is a voluntary, self-assessment program created so that reputable carriers could police themselves.

Participating fleets were required to exceed National Safety Code Standards, hours-of-service compliance rates, and several driver training and safety benchmarks in exchange for what was supposed to be relaxed scale enforcement, lower registration fees, and favorable notoriety among the shipper community.

The program, which attracted 28 carriers at one point, only partly worked. While fleets were able to meet and even exceed the tough standards — no more than one reportable accident per million miles in city areas; 0.3 accidents per million miles in non-urban areas; and keeping under a 10-percent OOS rate, among others — the promised benefits of PIC weren’t paying off. Eventually many carriers quit.

Kranenburg says the program has gotten a fresh start. “I would like to reintroduce the program under a whole new corporate identity without touching the standards,” he says, hinting that there’s a good chance the name of the program will be changed.

Kranenburg is currently soliciting contracts for the installation of new transponder technology in participating trucks and the province’s 12 scales. The purpose is to eliminate paperwork and reporting overlap, and ensure compliant carriers receive the automatic scale bypass they deserve.

The PIC program hopes to finally deliver
the scale privileges it once promised

“The key is that enforcement can now focus on the non-compliant companies,” Kranenburg says. “There is too much time wasted on companies that are well within compliance. Hopefully that becomes the carrot for companies to want to enroll.”

Other aspects of the program are on the road to reform as well. Plates, this time, will be voluntary or replaced with decals; reporting will be quarterly and completely electronic, eliminating the need “to mail in half-a-dozen documents,” says Kranenburg; and administrators and government are discussing the possibility of a single streamlined auditing process for PIC participants.

“Carriers basically said, ‘Lane, if you introduce another audit, then forget it.'”

Most importantly, however, is marketing the program to associations, officials and shippers across the country. Arguably, the biggest reason carriers jumped off the PIC wagon was because they were targeted by enforcement in other jurisdictions. In fact, said some truckers, PIC quickly turned into “PIC on me.”

“There were companies that took the plates off in some places for that very reason,” admits Kranenburg. “If we settled again on setting it up strictly as an interprovincial program, it won’t go anywhere. We have to take this beyond Alberta’s borders in a few years.”

Just as the Ontario Trucking Association (OTA) successfully exported its homemade speed-limiter plan to trucking associations across Canada, so hopes Kranenburg that the AMTA can sell its pet PIC project abroad.

The goal now is to try and get the other three western provinces and the state of Montana to green light the program before taking a proposal out east and other U.S. states with similar transponder technology. “But first we have to make it comfortable here,” says Kranenburg. “If we can really make it work and lead by example, then that’ll be the incentive for others to join too.”