Îlot Voyageur to be site of experiment
The city has an idea for the Îlot Voyageur: instead of having big transport trucks circulating in the streets, have them drop off shipments there to be picked up and brought to their eventual destinations in smaller vehicles.
Faiz Imam 08:50 on 2019-06-06 Permalink
And cargo bikes, that’s going to be a serious focus of the project.
I was actually at the mobility conference happening this week and saw their announcement live. These days all the big shipping brands, (FedEx, ups, dhl) have long running and successful bike and small truck based operations in many cities.
The single biggest challenge is having a staging area that is accessible to big trucks, but also central enough to be close to a large segment of the population. Îlot voyageur fits that profile perfectly.
One thing some of the shipping executives were saying (during a panel on optimizing sustainable urban parcel logistics) was they could have much more deliveries evenings and weekends, maybe even overnight, now that we have vehicles that make zero noise.
Also with more of a focus on delivering to dépanneurs and lockers around town, which is more convenient for them and often also for users.
Joey 09:08 on 2019-06-06 Permalink
Interesting and promising idea – hope it works out.
@Faiz the vehicles may make zero noise but the unloading, etc., certainly won’t.
Spi 09:59 on 2019-06-06 Permalink
The site might work for a pilot project but it’s not scalable in that location. Berri-Uqam is already way too close to the center of town. The goal is to have fewer 18-wheelers in the core of the city. Ironically one of the best locations for this would be where the proposed Royalmount will be.
Kate 10:05 on 2019-06-06 Permalink
Spi, that’s a good point. Put it where the highways converge. The Îlot means the trucks have to grind to and from the bridge through non-highway streets.
Another place that might work is the so far unused parts of Marché Central. There’s a lot of room there, the food distribution stuff seeming to have moved elsewhere in recent years, but it was already set up for logistics and transfers.
Kevin 10:18 on 2019-06-06 Permalink
Having unloaded my share of cargo trucks, I’m not sure this is going to work.
1) Ilot Voyageur is small
2) Trucks typically load up a lot of stuff at one location and then drop it off at several spots across a broad territory
3) I could see this work as a pickup/dropoff location for people or businesses within a few blocks, but those already exist in the downtown core.
Blork 11:37 on 2019-06-06 Permalink
Echoing Spi; my first thought when I heard them talking about this on CBC was the location is wrong; you want something like that on the edge of downtown, not in the middle.
OTOH, this is apparently a pilot project, and if it works, maybe they will move it to a more appropriate spot, like near Cité du Havre or near Nun’s Island.
DeWolf 12:51 on 2019-06-06 Permalink
I can’t see how this would work. It’s a central location with dense pedestrian and bicycle traffic, plus a constant stream of events in the Jardins Gamelin during the summer. How is that an appropriate place for a lot of heavy vehicles to converge?
Spi 14:06 on 2019-06-06 Permalink
The project also seems to ignore what 18-wheelers transport, for the most part, it’s pallets of products for a single client or multiple clients. Not something that can be transported easily by “zero-emission” alternatives.
Tim F 19:01 on 2019-06-06 Permalink
It’s an interesting pilot, but my thought was the same as blork’s: put it at the foot of the Bonaventure where it’s not in the hubbub of the city but close enough for bike couriers and the like.
Faiz Imam 23:32 on 2019-06-06 Permalink
So I have more information! I spoke to some folks about this! There is a non profit called Jallon that has been doing studies on urban parcel delivery for years. They are a major part of this pilot project and they presented their research. They’ve spoken to everyone. From small indie businesses to major chains ( McDonald’s, pharma prix, metro, couche-tard) all the shippers from global ones all the way to the small companies delivering fresh bread or flowers.
First of all this is not suppose to serve the entire city. This is the pilot project, and once they work out the kinks there is definitely a need to have more of them around the city. We could have dozens of them. This will only be for packages a few km radius of the îlot. And even then it won’t have the capacity to deal with everything.
All the issues mentioned are key factors that are parts of the study. Obviously the goal is to have things work better, not worse.
The key thing to note is that big rigs will not come here, it’s true those are too big, it’s more for medium trucks that currently do much of the delivery work in the middle of the city. The îlot already has a ton of bus traffic, these should not be much different. Also part of the study is to play with different off peak delivery Times to find what it less disruptive.
These companies need to do a lot more work on the back end. A person on a cargo bike is optimal for delivering a certain size and weight of package in certain specific geographies, mini trucks have a slightly different range of packages they are good at(and also can drive further out than bikes) the shippers need to analyze their inventory and divide which packages need to go to what delivery vehicle. This idea is that work can happen at the îlot.
Some sites like Amazon already deliver to deps, pharmacies and lockers, expanding that is a big goal. But also the idea of offering a “zéro-emission” option on the website checkout, perhaps on a longer time delay, also an order might end up being more efficient as multiple small packages rather than one large box as we usually prefer.
The data and analytics already exists. It’s a lot about how to share that data with both users and everyone in the supply chain to find the solution that is the cheapest, fastest and least disruptive.