challenges facing express delivery services in canada's urban centres

Institute of Housing & Mobility
Challenges facing the EDS industry in Canada's urban centres
planning departments in the Greater Toronto Area to study traffic flows. The motivation to
aggregate data at the TAZ level was the desire to observe the spatial trends for the
concentration of package delivery which becomes obvious with data aggregation. Also, the
planning department would find it convenient to relate to the analysis since we are using their
zonal system.
Once the data were geo-coded, the research team consulted industry experts and Statistics
Canada to determine the expansion factor for the data used in the analysis. The expansion
factor, derived from consultations with the industry, allowed the research team to expand the
numbers to reflect the activity of the entire industry, rather than just that of those firms whose data
were used in the analysis.
Results from Spatial Analysis
Figure 24 presents the study area. The shaded blue part constitutes the original study area, which
is bounded by Jarvis Street, the Rosedale Ravine, and Yonge Street on the east; Dupont Street
and McPherson Avenue to the north; Bathurst Street on the west; Lake Ontario to the south. The
brown colour boundaries identify traffic analysis zones that are either fully contained within the
study area or are intersected by the study area and hence extend slightly beyond the study
area.
FIGURE 24: STUDY AREA SHOWING THE TRAFFIC ANALYSIS ZONES (TAZS) IN DOWNTOWN TORONTO
Page 44