By Susan Burgess
Police say tow truck operators routinely fight to pick up vehicles at accident scenes.
But new restrictions from the region don’t attack the heart of the problem, say owners of towing companies.
Tow truck drivers must now get a police constable’s permission before parking within 100 metres of an accident on a regional road. They also need permission to offer services at the scene to the people involved.
The purpose of the new rules is two-fold: to make sure vehicles aren’t moved before police finish their investigation and to prevent arguments over which towing company gets to clean up afterward — and pick up the business.
The arguments happen “more than once or twice a week for sure,” says Sgt. Richard Lavigne of the Ottawa-Carleton Regional Police. He says officers often arrive at accident scenes to find tow trucks already there — and occasionally hooking up vehicles before police have had a chance to inspect the scene.
“Eight out of 10 times (the tow trucks) are there before we get there,” he says.
Police say towing companies find out about accidents by monitoring the radio communications of their competitors. They then head straight over to the scene — a practice known as “chasing.”
But Dan Dion of Dan’s Towing & Boosting Service says parking rules are not the way to stop that from happening.
Dion, one of the directors of Ontario’s provincial towing association, says chasing happens because the police have exclusive contracts with only four companies to take care of the 12,000 towing jobs officers request each year in the region.
“They’ve created the chasing,” he says. He adds that many companies that towed cars for local police detachments before the police services amalgamated in 1997 didn’t get a piece of the pie when the latest contracts were awarded, even though they met the basic requirements for the job.
“Now, you have to be a big tow firm from the city of Ottawa,” he says.
He says smaller companies in outlying areas would especially benefit if the police services board divided the region into more and smaller towing zones, and if police called qualified companies in those zones on a rotating basis when they needed assistance.
“That’s another system to look at for sure,” says Lavigne. But he says what’s in the best interests of the towing companies isn’t necessarily the most convenient solution for the police.
“We’d rather have one company towing for the whole region,” he says.
John Groulx owns Capital Towing and says his biggest concern with the new restrictions is that he’ll be slapped with a fine when responding to a bona fide call for help from a driver.
“I don’t care if it costs me whatever it costs in court. I’ll fight it,” he says.
Groulx says police officers often discourage people from calling the towing service of their choice. He says it happens even when the police don’t need to hold the vehicle and when there’s no need to move it quickly for safety reasons.
“They should inform the public that it’s their right to choose whoever they want,” Groulx says.
Lavigne says police officers know drivers are free to choose their own towing service when the accident investigation is over.
But Groulx says he’s preparing legal action against an officer who, he claims, prevented one of his operators from helping a driver who called for service — even though the driver’s car wasn’t blocking traffic, and the tow truck was only about two kilometres away from the breakdown.
Regional council has voted to review the new tow truck restrictions after one year. Meanwhile, the region will ask the province to approve fines.