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Take Freight and Waste Out of Toronto's Rush Hour

Eric Richmond

Eric Richmond

August 9, 2026

All Toronto Memos

Take Freight and Waste Out of Toronto's Rush Hour

Eric Richmond

Eric Richmond

August 9, 2026

Key Messages
01

Commercial deliveries and waste collection in Toronto currently overlap with when people need the roads for travelling to work and school.

02

Through a series of small, thoughtful, low cost decisions the City can significantly improve congestion by moving much of this use to off-peak hours.

03

This has been tested in Toronto and other cities and been proven to improve transit times as well as quality of life.

Move the city’s most schedulable road trips — commercial deliveries and waste collection — into off-peak hours on the busiest corridors, scaling a practice Toronto already runs downtown at night, to free daytime road space at almost no capital cost.

Summary

Toronto’s rush hour includes trips that must happen then — people travelling to work and school — but also trips that have merely been scheduled then by habit and rule. Commercial deliveries and municipal waste collection are the largest of the second kind, and the City can choose to move them off the daytime peak on the busiest corridors. This has already been tested. Toronto collects waste overnight downtown, between 9 p.m. and 6:45 a.m. 1, and New York’s off-hour delivery program cut the time a truck spends at the curb per stop from 100 minutes to 30 2. The fix can use levers the City already holds — its own waste schedule, its noise and curb by-laws, and a voluntary off-hour delivery program modelled on New York’s — and routes through the Chief Congestion Officer’s mandate.

The Recommendation

Toronto should move its most schedulable road trips out of the daytime peak. Rush-hour congestion is treated as one undifferentiated problem, but it is not. Part of it is people who have to travel at that hour. Another part is vehicles that run in daytime by habit and by rule, not by necessity — and the two largest of these, commercial deliveries and waste collection, are trips the City can reschedule. Moving them off the peak will mean fewer vehicles on the road at a time when most people that travel for work or school have to be there. Waste collection is operated directly by Solid Waste Management Services, which already runs overnight collection downtown between 9 p.m. and 6:45 a.m. 1; this model could be extended as part of a straightforward service-standard decision. Off-hour deliveries turn on the City’s own noise and curb by-laws and on a voluntary program to recruit large receivers — both municipal. The Province enters at one point only: delivery noise. During the pandemic an Ontario regulation suspended the City’s authority to enforce delivery-noise limits, and the off-peak deliveries that followed worked well enough that the City recommended the change be made permanent 3. That is the single intergovernmental ask; the rest is the City’s to do.

This approach is about managing an existing system through the right incentives. The City does not need to run new deliveries, buy trucks or invest in infrastructure; it needs to lift the rule that bunches these trips into daytime and let carriers move the trips they would rather make at night anyway, when the roads are clear. Where it does act — on its own waste fleet — it should act competently: phased by corridor, with quiet-collection equipment, and measured before it is scaled. New York has been running a similar system for fifteen years that can act as proof: its off-hour delivery program, voluntary and incentive-led, cut curb time per stop by 70% and is now permanent city policy 2. A 2019 Region of Peel pilot in the GTA reached the same result, shifting up to 30% of trucks out of peak hours and cutting travel time 18% 3.

The Problem

By TomTom’s measure, Toronto drivers each lost about 100 hours to rush-hour congestion in 2025, the second-worst record among Canadian cities 8. The CANCEA puts the socioeconomic cost of congestion across the region at $44.7 billion a year and rising 7. These are regional, estimated figures, but the direction is not in doubt, and the cost falls on everyone who crosses the city by road in daytime: commuters, transit riders on mixed-traffic streets, and the trades and services whose work is the trip itself.

A significant share of that daytime traffic does not need to be there.

Commercial deliveries and Waste removal services have to be able to make trips daily but the timing for these trips is flexible. When the pandemic emptied downtown streets in 2020, light-auto traffic fell to about 40% of normal while truck traffic held near 75% 3. Waste collection is an additional layer: Solid Waste Management Services collects from roughly 870,000 residential households 6. These trips are non-negotiable but the current operations run in daylight. The City has the tools it needs to change this.

Waste schedules are set by Solid Waste Management Services. Deliveries are shaped by the Noise By-law, which restricts loading between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m., and by the curb rules in the Curbside Management Strategy 5. The most recent material move is the City’s: its 2020 Freight and Goods Movement Strategy made promoting off-peak delivery its first short-term action 3, and the 2023–2026 Congestion Management Plan directed staff to develop a roll-out strategy for peak-hour delivery restrictions 9. It is clear that the City has signalled its intention to make changes here but it has yet to scale the practice from the downtown core and the pandemic pilot to the corridors where it would do the most good.

What off-peak buys. Similar changes in other cities have yielded significant results. As part of New York City’s off-hour delivery pilot: a truck making the same deliveries between 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. spent 30 minutes at the curb per stop, against 100 minutes in daytime traffic 2. Travel speeds from depot to first stop rose by up to 75%, and whole routes finished 48 minutes faster 2. Deliveries that can be moved off the peak will not only free up road space for commuters but will create faster, cheaper trips for the carrier. The same logic already drives Toronto’s overnight downtown collection, where the trucks meet almost no traffic.

##Implementation

Scale overnight waste collection beyond the core. City Council should direct the General Manager, Solid Waste Management Services, in consultation with Transportation Services and the Chief Congestion Officer, to extend the existing nighttime collection model — already running downtown between 9 p.m. and 6:45 a.m. 1 — to the busiest mixed-traffic corridors citywide, on a published schedule that sequences corridors by daytime congestion and sets quiet-equipment standards before any route moves. Report the corridors selected and the measured travel-time effect to the Infrastructure and Environment Committee within the 2027 service-plan cycle. This should follow the model the City already uses to run its downtown night routes: not a blanket switch, but corridor by corridor, with low-noise equipment and a published basis, so the disturbance stays contained and the road benefit is banked where congestion is worst.

Stand up the off-hour delivery program the City already approved. City Council should direct the General Manager, Transportation Services, with the Chief Congestion Officer, to implement the off-peak delivery program that is already the first short-term action of the 2020 Freight and Goods Movement Strategy 3: recruit large receivers — grocery and retail chains, hospitals, institutions — on the busiest corridors into a voluntary off-hour delivery program modelled on New York’s, with low-noise handling standards, and report uptake and measured travel-time effects to the Committee by the fourth quarter of 2027. In parallel, City Council should amend the Noise By-law (Toronto Municipal Code Chapter 591) to permit certified quiet deliveries in the off-hour window where loading is otherwise restricted, and authorize the City Solicitor to introduce the necessary bill. The design follows New York’s: voluntary, incentive-led approach rather than a blunt mandate 2.

Pilot containerized collection on residential streets. City Council should direct the General Manager, Solid Waste Management Services, to run a time-limited pilot of shared, containerized waste collection on a set of volunteer residential streets — the approach common in European cities, where households use shared street containers rather than individual curbside set-outs — and to report collection time per street, cost per tonne, cleanliness, and off-peak compatibility to the Committee by the end of 2027. Containerization would make off-peak collection efficient at the residential scale: a truck servicing a handful of shared containers stops far less often and makes far less noise than one lifting bins house by house. This would be new for Toronto, so it should run as a measured pilot on willing streets, with accessible set-out options preserved, before any judgment about wider use — the City’s standard practice with an untried service change.

Financial impact. No material capital cost. Extending night collection carries an operating premium for shift differentials, to be costed by the General Manager, Solid Waste Management Services, and confirmed by the Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer through the 2027 budget process; the off-hour delivery program and the containerization pilot are low-cost and can be accommodated within the Congestion Management Plan’s approved 2026–2028 envelope 4. The decisive return is reclaimed daytime road capacity, which the same plan is already spending to buy by other means.

Risks and objections. The strongest objection is noise: trucks running overnight wake the people who live on the route. The cost is real, and it is why the program should include quiet-equipment standards, targeted first at commercial and arterial corridors, and phased — and why the Noise By-law change is conditional on certified-quiet operation, not a blanket exemption. Toronto’s downtown core has also absorbed night collection for years, which shows precedent for the change 1.

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