Opinion: Shippers Should Put Safety First

This Opinion piece appears in the May 3 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

In trucking parlance, a “shipper” is anyone, be it a business or an individual, that hires a truck to transport goods. A shipper may hire a truck for any of a variety of reasons: Perhaps there is a long distance to cover or the load requires more space than available in the trunk of a car. Or perhaps the trucking company has expertise in shipping goods across the Canadian/U.S. border or the border between the United States and Mexico. 

Once a shipper decides to hire a trucking company, however, the primary factor that closes the deal — indeed, sometimes the only factor — is price.

I come across this situation time and again, so the following anecdote is typical: A shipper once demanded that I do something about a truck driver in his yard who had failed to back a trailer up to the loading bay after umpteen tries and 45 long minutes. The deed eventually was done by a more skilled driver from a rival trucking company, but my response to his demand that I do something about the situation was that this type of problem can be solved only by the shippers themselves.

Consider what this shipper had or had not done as the situation evolved outside his window. Did he call the trucking company to find out why it had dispatched an unqualified driver? For that matter, had he even checked the qualifications of the trucking company before hiring it in the first place?

In fact, what happened in the shipper’s yard should have been the least of his worries: He should have been far more afraid of what could be happening to his shipment once it was on the road.

Minimizing costs and outselling the competition are important factors. I get that. But safety, high-quality service and simply hiring a reputable company should always trump cost-cutting, and shippers should always be suspicious if the freight rate they’re quoted by a trucking company is so low as to defy belief. It costs serious money to buy a truck, maintain it, hire skilled professionals, and invest in ongoing safety training and the like.

Trucking companies are subject to countless safety regulations governing matters such as driver hours of work, load security and vehicle standards. The vast majority of trucking companies follow these rules, and the government is supposed to enforce the rules for the few that don’t.

But “few” is relative in a province such as British Columbia, which boasts more than 20,000 trucking companies to keep in line, representing a significant portion of the province’s economy. (British Columbia Trucking Association members alone operate more than 13,000 vehicles, employ 26,000 people and generate more than $2 billion in revenue within the province annually.)

Despite trucking’s importance, with shrinking budgets, government is less able to monitor the bad apples in the trucking industry, which is exactly why shippers must play their part in supporting safe trucking companies by asking those companies the right questions:

• What are your professional driver hiring standards?

• How do you monitor your hiring practices? 

• What is your carrier safety plan? 

• How do you maintain your vehicles? 

• How do you monitor the number of hours your drivers work each day? 

• How much and what types of insurance does your company carry?

• What is your company’s speed-enforcement policy?

• How is that speed-enforcement policy monitored?

Reputable companies can and will supply answers to all these questions.

Shippers are responsible for making safe choices. They can be more effective than any provincial or state government bureaucrat when it comes to improving safety on the road by being more exacting and demanding when hiring a trucking company.

However, the question is whether shippers are willing to put safety before price.

The British Columbia Trucking Association, Langley, British Columbia, represents more than 800 truck and bus fleets and more than 250 suppliers to the industry.