challenges facing express delivery services in canada's urban centres

Institute of Housing & Mobility
Challenges facing the EDS industry in Canada's urban centres
Figure 27 reveals that the highest concentration of deliveries is in the area bounded by Yonge
street to the east, University Avenue to the west, Wellington street to the south, and Queen street
to the north. The area around Yonge and Dundas streets also received a large number of
deliveries. Furthermore, a little to the north of downtown, one can observe the concentration of
deliveries along the Bloor street corridor, where key intersections along Bloor street attracted a
significantly large number of deliveries.
Also, obvious from Figure 27 is the fact that courier deliveries are spatially concentrated to
specific segments of the street network in downtown Toronto. This implies that their concentration is
ubiquitous, but not random. This may allow the possibility of providing courier-specific parking
infrastructure in select destinations in downtown Toronto.
Using the expansion factors derived from consultations with the industry experts, the survey data
were weighted to represent the extent of deliveries made by the entire population of couriers
and same day messengers. The project team estimated that the study area receives on an
average 81,000 packages per day (Table 12). As mentioned earlier, there is some seasonality
observed in the data where the volume of packages delivered in December is higher than volume
of packages delivered in June and September. However, packages delivered in April were found
to be the second highest in volume after December.
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