Smart Freight Centre built on regional collaboration, says Roorda - University of Toronto Transportation Research Institute

Regional collaboration among universities, governments and industry is essential to helping solve shared challenges across the Greater Toronto Hamilton Area (GTHA), business leaders and university researchers said at a forum in Hamilton on October 3, 2019.

“It takes persistence and leadership to move past some of those barriers to get large institutions to make partnerships work well. We’ve had some pretty good success with that,” said Matthew Roorda, professor and Canada Research Chair in Freight Transportation and Logistics, and Chair of the Smart Freight Centre.

The Centre brings together leading experts from the Region of Peel, U of T and McMaster and York Universities to improve and future-proof how goods are delivered across the GTHA. Preliminary research from Roorda’s lab has already found that when major retailers shifted their deliveries to off-peak hours, average trip time decreased by 17 per cent.

Read more of “Regional collaboration needed to solve Ontario’s challenges, forum hears” by the University of Toronto Government Relations Office on their website