Could mandatory dashcams encourage B.C.’s commercial drivers to focus on safety?
The District of Barriere got support for the idea at the annual meeting of Southern Interior municipal leaders this week.
The Southern Interior Local Government Association conference passed Barriere’s resolution calling for the province to consider making dashcams mandatory for all commercial semi-trucks registered in B.C.
Barriere’s mayor, Ward Stamer, said he believes mandatory dashcams would make truck drivers more accountable for their actions.
The municipality’s push to make the cameras mandatory comes after a string of collisions some involving commercial vehicles.
“We’ve had just a horrible winter season on Highway 5 north of Kamloops. We’ve had multiple fatalities. We’ve had major crashes and we put a resolution forward just because it is another tool in the toolbox,” said Stamer.
Stamer said the devices only cost around $100 and the province could consider offering discounted insurance rates to companies that installed the cameras.
“This would be the first jurisdiction in North America to have mandatory dashcams, but…when there is a crash it will be that much easier to reconstruct and see exactly what happened,” Stamer said.
After getting support from other leaders in the Southern Interior, Barriere plans to take the proposal to a province-wide local government meeting and continue lobbying the province to adopt the dashcam requirement.
The BC Trucking Association said many trucking companies are already outfitting their vehicles with dashcams voluntarily.
“A variety of fleets are using them for a whole bunch of reasons not the least of which is to settle insurance claims,” said Dave Earle, president of the BC Trucking Association.
“It has been in practice for a long time. Our board has absolutely no problem with dashcams being equipped in vehicles, it is just a matter of what does that process look like?”
The industry group said the vast majority of drivers are operating their vehicles very safely and it’s hard to say if dashcams will prevent some from making bad decisions.
“These aren’t judgment calls. What we see with these egregious incidents from time to time is they are just really, really bad decisions. So as much as this will provide evidence to be able to deal with it after the fact, we really need to think about why are these decisions being made in the moment,” Earle said.
Asked what he would suggest to improve commercial vehicle safety, Earle said the Trucking Association was happy to see the province move forward with a bill that would require “the use of speed-limiter equipment to regulate the maximum speed of heavy-duty commercial vehicles.”
Earle suggested safety improvements are also about adjusting expectations around delivery speed.
“Really the conversation we really need to have is with our customers and with the public to say, ‘How business has been done in the past cannot continue in the future.’ What that means is it is going to take longer to get the goods that you and I rely on every day…We need to do it safely and we need to make changes,” Earle said.
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