TORONTO — A Toronto city councillor says he would ban all truck deliveries in the city’s downtown core for six hours a day, during morning and evening rush hour.

Councillor, Michael Walker is expected to pitch his proposal later today. He is urging that trucks be restricted from picking up or dropping off goods between the hours of 7:00 am-10:00 am and 3:00 pm-6:00 pm.

Delivery times is shippers issue, not truckers, says OTA

Ontario Trucking Association President David Bradley says truckers serving customers in the downtown core would gladly avoid operating during rush hour when the costs of congestion are highest, but adds delivery schedules are out of truckers’ hands. There has to be someone at the shipper or consignee premises to hand-off or receive the goods, he says. And, therein is the problem.

“If there was a way that trucks could avoid having to make pick-ups and deliveries during the periods of highest traffic congestion, we would do so,” he says. “The costs of congestion are enormous for the trucking industry.”

“Our customers — in this case the businesses located in the downtown core — dictate when and where our trucks pick-up and deliver goods. The problem is, and has always been, that few businesses in the core are 24/7 enterprises. They need to be convinced to take on the additional cost of having staff available to receive or load goods during off-peak times.”

Regardless, Bradley adds that the major contributors to congestion are not the trucks, but cars, many of which are occupied by a sole person.

“It would seem to us that with all the new investment in transit — which is supposedly designed to get people out of their cars — a reasonable alternative exists for most of these motorists. No such alternative exists, however, for the businesses that rely on trucks to deliver goods. There are, for example, no rail lines running into the Eaton Centre.”

He says that over the past 20 years, the City of Toronto has conducted various goods movement studies and analysis, which came up with some alternate good recommendations — very few of which have been put into practice.