British Columbia Motor Carrier License Plates

A special thanks to Bill Hobbis, Tom Lindner, Dallas Doyle, Graham Casey, Don Schneider and Ron Garay for providing many of the plates pictured.

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The origins of the Motor Carrier license plate in British Columbia - as in most other jurisdictions across North America - can be traced to the competitive decline of the railroads vis-a-vis the trucking industry during the first decades of the 20th century.

The railroad industry had been regulated since the mid-1800s with maximum-rate controls shielding merchants and farmers from the potentially monopolistic pricing of the railway companies, and minimum-rate controls serving to protect the railway companies from each other. These regulations, however, left the railroads vulnerable to competition from other modes of transport.

In the United States, an expanding inter-state highway system and the nationalisation of the railway system during the First Word War allowed truckers to fill the void created in private freight haulage. At the conclusion of the war, trucking was an accepted form of transportation and Pennsylvania became the first state to adopt trucking regulations in 1914, with an additional thirty-five states following by 1925.

Generally, the controls that were applied to the trucking industry were patterned after the regulations used in the railway and public utility fields and concerned restrictions on entry and limited the maximum and minimum rates that truckers could charge.

With the onset of the Depression in the late 1920s, the trucking industry came to support government regulation as many larger trucking firms felt their businesses were being threatened by "fly-by-night" operators who offered cut-rate prices that ultimately forced down wages and disrupted the whole rate structure in an area.

As a result of these pressures, some provinces had begun to regulate trucking in the 1920s, and by the mid-1930s most provinces had some form of economic regulation, typically in the form of entry restrictions.

In British Columbia, the Highway Act, being Chapter 103 of the "Revised Statutes of British Columbia, 1924," was amended in 1925 when the following subsection was added:

Prescribing that in case of any motor-vehicle operated or about to be operated by or on behalf of a person carrying on upon the highway the business of a public carrier of passengers, or of passengers and goods, over a stated route or between fixed termini or at stated intervals, the owner or person in charge of the motor-vehicle, before the commencement or continuation of its operation, as the case may be, shall file with the Minister a schedule with reference to such operation showing the times and points of departure and arrival, and shall obtain his certificate of approval of the schedule; and prescribing that it shall be unlawful to operate any such motor-vehicle at a speed greater than the average speed indicated by the times of departure and arrival in the schedule approved; all regulations under this clause being subject, however, to the proviso that where it is found necessary in cases of emergency or owing to unusual traffic conditions to operate additional motor-vehicles over the route covered by an approved schedule, the person by or on whose behalf the said business is carried on shall notify the Minister within forty-eight hours after any additional motor-vehicle has been so operated, giving particulars of such operation and the reason therefor, but all additional motor-vehicles so operated shall be subject to the same regulations as to speed as are applicable under this clause to motor-vehicles regularly operated over said route.

As a a subsequent Annual Report of the Public Utilities Commission stated, prior to 1930, the only control of motor carriers was with respect to this need to obtain a "certificate of approval" (as stated above) and, later, a "Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity" as well as to file insurance with the province.

1926 - 1929

1926