Off-peak delivery

NRU
July 11, 2018
Rob Jowett

Peel Region is striving to reduce congestion and emissions with a new off-peak delivery pilot project.

Situated between Toronto and the U.S. border the region contains seven 400-series highways, the largest international airport in Canada and two major intermodal rail hubs. An estimated $1.8 billion of goods move through the Peel every day.

“Our roads are congested now with peak-hour traffic. And there’s only so much that we can do still add capacity,” transportation division director Gary Kocialek told NRU.

He says one of the most important ways to manage congestion is to reduce the high volume of trucks on the highways--154,862,000 tonnes of goods worth $502,218,000 are transported by truck through Peel each year.

The pilot is intended to help reduce truck traffic during peak hours by 5 to10 per cent.
The region has partnered with the LCBO, Walmart, Loblaw, PepsiCo, and Weston Foods to test goods delivery between 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. Deloitte Canada has been retained as advisors on the project, and Metrolinx and The Atmospheric Fund are providing project funding to support their own transportation and emissions goals. The pilot will run through December.

“Peel has become a natural logistics hub… I think we are the logistics hub of Canada,” Kocialek says.

There are wider implications across the GTA if the project is successful, says Peel transportation system planner Pegan Tootoonchian.

“The idea is to be able to take the lessons learnt from the pilot and be able to collaborate with our neighbouring municipalities and neighbouring regions to be able to determine how we could potentially expand off-peak delivery across a wider network beyond the Region of Peel,” she says.

Metrolinx spokesperson Anne Marie Aikens says Metrolinx partnered on this initiative because it is interested in the potential expansion of an off-peak delivery program.

“The findings of this pilot could not only provide lessons learned for Metrolinx and Peel Region but could also help with congestion in other municipalities,” she says. She adds that the pilot is a way to accommodate truck traffic without impacting buses. In fact, it might improve bus service.

One of the reasons the pilot program was undertaken was to discover and mitigate restrictions on off-peak delivery, says Kocialek. He says noise is one of the main concerns for residents.

“For example, if… the LCBO was doing nighttime deliveries on a route,” he explains. “and [the store is] underneath apartment buildings on a main street … the noise of the back-up beeper would be disruptive to residents who live above the LCBO.”

The pilot is part of Peel Region’s Goods Movement Strategic Plan 2017-2021, a five-year plan to set strategies in place to manage growth over the coming decades. The population of the region is expected to grow by 600,000 people to more than two million by 2041. By that time, as many as six million trucks could be going through the region.

“A big part of the work that we’re going to be doing over the next 23 years to accommodate that growth is around how… we manage the peak and how… we better utilize the infrastructure we have now,” says Kocialek.