How UPS trucks saved millions of dollars by eliminating left turns
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Re: How UPS trucks saved millions of dollars by eliminating left turns
#2It's funny because occasionally my wife will tell me to take a certain route to a destination because that is what her traffic app told her was the fastest route. I'll disagree on the basis of this experiment; that the "fastest route" has too many left turns and that my route is better because it has fewer. Needless to say, she is never amused. Maybe after this news I'll be vindicated!
Re: How UPS trucks saved millions of dollars by eliminating left turns
#3This is why I love data science
Re: How UPS trucks saved millions of dollars by eliminating left turns
#4Does typical navigation software assign the same cost to a left turn as a right turn?
Re: How UPS trucks saved millions of dollars by eliminating left turns
#5Yes they may save money doing this, but when you do that follow your driver for your delivery thing they just came out with, It looks like your driver is on crack the travel patterns make no sense. No order. They are all over the place, similar to how Delta does connecting flights.
Re: How UPS trucks saved millions of dollars by eliminating left turns
#6> eliminating left turns wherever possible after it found that drivers have to sit idly in the trucks while waiting to take the left turn to pass through traffic. So, it created an algorithm that eliminated left turns from drivers’ routes even if meant a longer journey.
Sounds reasonable.
> In 2005 ... the total distance covered by its 96,000 trucks was reduced by 747,000km. In 2011, ... the company had reduced distance travelled by trucks by 20.4 million miles. A recent report by The Independent says that the total reduction in distance travelled by UPS trucks now stands at 45.8 million miles.
But how does eliminating left turns even it means a longer journey reduce the total distance travelled?
Edit:
The Independent article referenced here explains:
> The efficiency of planning routes with its navigation software this way has even helped the firm cut the number of trucks it uses by 1,100, bringing down the company’s total distance travelled by 28.5m miles – despite the longer routes.
Re: How UPS trucks saved millions of dollars by eliminating left turns
#7This is an impressive result, but not exactly a UPS exclusive. Pretty much any vehicle routing software worth using has offside-turn-minimization options, usually as one of several 'weighting factors'. For example, almost every garbage collection service of any size minimizes its offside turns.
Re: How UPS trucks saved millions of dollars by eliminating left turns
#8> In the US, and other countries where you drive on the right side of the road, right turns are free, but for a left turn you need to wait for a green light.
I don't know of any other country than the US where turning right on red is allowed, unless there's specific signage or additional traffic lights to allow it. Indeed, the turn-on-red rule in the US seems to work inverse to how I've seen it elsewhere – i.e. it's always allowed unless there's specific signage saying it isn't.
I was just in the US, and I love their turn-on-red rules, and I kept thinking that sometimes it's got to be smarter to turn right than go straight ahead, when there's a red light, even if it may be a longer drive. Glad to see someone took the time to figure this out.
Re: How UPS trucks saved millions of dollars by eliminating left turns
#9> In the US, and other countries where you drive on the right side of the road, right turns are free, but for a left turn you need to wait for a green light. I don't know of any other country than the US where turning right on red is allowed, unless there's specific signage or additional traffic lights to allow it. Indeed, the turn-on-red rule in the US seems to work inverse to how I've seen it elsewhere – i.e. it's…
> Indeed, the turn-on-red rule in the US seems to work inverse to how I've seen it elsewhere – i.e. it's always allowed unless there's specific signage saying it isn't.
Driving laws vary widely by state. You cannot say "$x is [il]legal in the US" because it's likely there's at least one state where the inverse is true. That being said, my state does allow turning on red unless it's explicitly prohibited, including left turns if you are on a one-way street turning onto a one-way street.
> I kept thinking that sometimes it's got to be smarter to turn right than go straight ahead, when there's a red light, even if it may be a longer drive.
The city I live in actually times the light cycles to prevent this, you will end up exactly where you would have been had you not turned, or behind.
Re: How UPS trucks saved millions of dollars by eliminating left turns
#10Does typical navigation software assign the same cost to a left turn as a right turn?
If your navigation software doesn't permit weighting different turns, it's not really worth using for a business/organization of any substantial size. Usually there's also cost assignment/weighting for things like traffic time, stoplights-vs-all-way-stops, effective speed limits, time-vs-distance balancing, and all the zonal assignments that come up when breaking up a bunch of stops into different vehicles' routes for the day.