Appendix · Appendix A2

Curb Space and the Last Mile

Working chapter of Why can’t Toronto move? — the report’s summary page uses only claims that passed our receipt check. Figures below marked ⚠️ are still in the re-verification queue, labelled honestly rather than hidden. How that works: check our work.

Every metre of curb in Toronto is already claimed by someone — parking, loading, cafés, bike lanes, transit — and the cities getting the most congestion relief per dollar are the ones that ranked those claims deliberately instead of letting whoever arrived first keep the space.

Toronto manages roughly 20,000 on-street metered spaces through Green P, at $6.50 an hour in the downtown core, alongside a CaféTO program that's turned over 1,500-plus curb spaces to outdoor dining since 2020. Both are real curb-management programs. Neither is built on the kind of real-time occupancy data that lets a city actively allocate space toward its highest-value use — and that gap is where the evidence says the money is.

Ranked by measured congestion relief per dollar spent, protected cycling infrastructure with year-round winter maintenance comes first. Paris saw a 240% increase in cycling over five years without a matching rise in congestion; Seville's decade-long build-out took daily cycling trips from 13,000 to 72,000, a 452% increase, while cutting the crash rate in half. The winter-maintenance piece isn't optional: Oulu, Finland, 100 km south of the Arctic Circle, gets 12% of winter trips by bike specifically because its 600 km of bike paths are cleared daily, and the research literature on the subject — spanning Sweden, Finland, and Canadian cities — converges on the same finding, that plowing and maintenance matter as much as the infrastructure itself.

Second on the ranked list is demand-responsive curb pricing paired with real-time sensors — the SFpark model, which adjusted meter rates dynamically to keep occupancy in a 60–80% band. The result wasn't just less circling for parking; sales tax revenue in priced zones rose 35%, against 20% citywide, showing curb pricing shifts behaviour without hurting the businesses that depend on the curb. Seattle's newer Smart Curb program applies the same logic to commercial loading zones specifically, using the Open Mobility Foundation's Curb Data Specification — an open standard now adopted by Seattle, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and several other cities — to track real-time dwell and occupancy.

Freight consolidation is third, and it's where cargo bikes do real work: Berlin's KoMoDo program cut delivery costs 28% and emissions 22% by substituting cargo bikes for vans on last-mile routes, with field results showing mileage down 66% and greenhouse-gas emissions down 80% against diesel vans on the substituted trips. Parcel lockers, farther down the ranking but still worthwhile, cut curb dwell time by a third and vehicle-miles by nearly 60% in field studies, at meaningfully lower cost than home delivery.

Toronto's own bike network sits in legal limbo that has nothing to do with any of this evidence: 19 km of protected lanes on Yonge, Bloor, and University remain in place only because a Superior Court judge found the province's Bill 212 bike-lane removal arbitrary and a Charter violation, a ruling Ontario is appealing with a hearing scheduled for January 2026. Whatever the outcome, the underlying congestion-relief case for protected cycling infrastructure doesn't depend on that litigation — it's the single highest-ranked lever in this catalogue regardless of how the appeal resolves. Toronto's Freight and Goods Movement Strategy, approved in 2020, sets the right priorities on paper; what's missing is a published, current progress report showing which of its 24 actions have actually moved.