challenges facing express delivery services in canada's urban centres

Institute of Housing & Mobility
Challenges facing the EDS industry in Canada's urban centres
REVIEW OF URBAN TRANSPORT PLANS
While transport planners in urban areas are responsible for all issues related to transport, it often
turns out that the planners are more concerned about passenger transportation. The attention
paid to freight transport in general and the couriers industry in particular is minimal.
In order to gain firsthand knowledge of planning initiatives related to commercial transportation,
we designed and administered a survey of transport planners in large urban centres (population
greater than 0.5 million) in Canada. A copy of the survey form is located in the appendix.
Despite our best efforts, the response from urban transport planners, employed by municipal
governments, was very poor. After months of lobbying, the project team was unable to get even
a single transport planner to participate in the survey. In fact, some planners were of the view
that planning of commercial vehicles, especially couriers and same-day messengers, was not even
a transportation issue and therefore not part of the transport planning mandate. Consider an
email response received from the transport planning department in one of the cities contacted in
Canada that reflects the lack of awareness amongst municipal transport planners about freight
and couriers.
FIGURE 8: TRANSPORT PLANNERS CONSIDER COURIERS OUT OF THEIR PLANNING MANDATE
The lacklustre response by urban planners required us to adopt an alternative approach. The
project team decided to review the latest municipal transport plans for large urban centres in
Canada to determine if commercial vehicle planning is addressed.
Needless to say, the needs of the courier and light goods transportation industry need to be
accounted for to ensure that Canadian industries are able to conduct business and operate
efficiently. The points-of-contact between couriers and customers, the pick-ups and deliveries at
local addresses, are by their very nature transitory and dispersed. As such, the level of
government with the greatest influence on courier operations is the local, municipal level. In this
section the transport plans in Canada’s largest city-regions of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver,
Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, and Hamilton are reviewed.
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