Route Planning Software for Residential Areas

[grasscutter]

How do vehicles like city trash trucks navigate neighborhoods without going down the same street twice or skipping streets?

I assume some type of route software, but most route planning software are for multiple stops across an entire city, not within one neighborhood.

Not all neighborhoods are set up with streets that run like graph paper by running straight North to South or East to West. ( I wish they were! )

A vehicle like Amazon delivery trucks would use route planning software across an entire city, but what if every single house in one neighborhood was waiting for a package? I know that's highly unlikely but what if?

Ice cream trucks are another type of vehicle that I assume would use some kind of route software to keep from wasting time and fuel.

The way neighborhoods are set up with streets going in all kinds of different directions, a vehicle could easily get lost or travel in circles going over the same streets multiple times.

 

[awguy]

Back in my day no one used software. They just learned the route over time. No computers.

 

[rijndael]

https://soft-pak.com/routing/

 

[Vercingetorix]

Watching the clownshow Amazon deliveries around here, they desperately need better software.

 

[opus1]

I figure that there has to be some sort of efficiency/route optimizing going on.

My example: The house sits at the top of a "T" intersection. On pick-up day, the truck will come down the connecting street, pick up the cans from us and the neighbor, continue down the street picking up trash on our side, and about 10 minutes later will come back up the street from the opposite direction, picking up the trash on the other side of the street. This had to have been planned because I don't think the driver came up with the plan by just winging it.

 

[IndyIan]

There's quite a few routing software options available. For an amazon type driver, they might have an app that geocodes all the delivery addresses for the day in the warehouse, and then figure out the packing list and route for each truck? The app geocodes the addresses on a road network with lanes, 1 or 2 way, intersection type, then it comes up with the most efficient routes, and gives turn by turn directions. Some would use live traffic info, and even predictive traffic, and they should reroute on the fly.
~99% of the time this should work, but there can be a few spots where the addressing isn't quite right due to similar street names, or wrong address ranges, or the addressing has been changed recently. The smaller rural municipalities tend to have more mistakes in the road network and no one fixes them, so the drivers have to remember that they can't go down the unmaintained road that the app is telling them they can use.
In our area, they would have to remember which way they could go down a back road in the winter as they might not be able to climb a hill, no app has that level of local knowledge.
For us, sometimes we have van coming from 110 miles away which seems inefficient as they spend almost 4 hrs per shift just getting to the local delivery area, but I guess just handling the packages one less time saves some money.
Probably makes sense to have drivers do a regular area, and during covid we had the same guys show up again and again for amazon, but now it seems pretty random. Purolator, and the other package delivery companies have regular drivers for our area, and they get to know our driveway, and dogs.

 

[SC Maintenance]

Watching the clownshow Amazon deliveries around here, they desperately need better software.

I make bets Amazon has the best routing software on the planet.

If your contract driver can't follow it that doesn't surprise me at all.

 

[ecotourist]

The nav system on our Tesla sometimes gives us sub-optimal directions. It sometimes tries to send us down a street to cross or make a left hand turn onto a busy street where there is no traffic light, and it tends to choose the shortest route while ignoring easier and faster routes.

So either local knowledge (or better AI input) would make for better routing. It would be nice if there was some capacity for learning too.

 

[Vercingetorix]

A friend of mine showed me where his next stop was according to routing software. He was supposed to go from Oregon to the Azores. No joke. I told him to start heading east until he ran out of gas, then make a phone call.

 

[Vercingetorix]

Routing software is oftentimes optimized for shortest distance i.e. surface streets, when the freeway, while longer, saves more time. Labor is much more expensive than fuel.

 

[PF52]

I'm always amused when I look out the window here at the office and I see the UPS truck stopping at all the businesses on the other side of the street, and then 90 minutes later he comes back and does our side. I get it, I get it.... This way he's not constantly crossing the street back and forth. He's gone so long I think he's probably doing the whole neighborhood, one side of the street at a time. It always makes me wonder if he ever forgets to do the other side of a street somewhere.

 

[rijndael]

Routing software is oftentimes optimized for shortest distance i.e. surface streets, when the freeway, while longer, saves more time. Labor is much more expensive than fuel.

It's also optimized for avoiding left turns and high accident intersections. Left turns are more likely to be involved in accidents.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a36620755/eliminate-left-turns/

 

[ecotourist]

Routing software is oftentimes optimized for shortest distance i.e. surface streets, when the freeway, while longer, saves more time.

Surface streets have more potential for accidents too.

 

[Vercingetorix]

The big question is why isn’t AI used for traffic lights? Why are all still stuck at lights when nobody is going through them?

 

[uc50ic4more]

I am a web developer and a good number of my clients make deliveries in and around my city/county area. There are a handful of really effective route planning platforms online; some with generous-enough free tiers.

 

[grasscutter]

At this point I'm beginning to wonder how a route planner works. Do you have to manually type in every single address of every house in the neighborhood? Some of those neighborhoods have upwards of 400 houses. I'm no software engineer, but I imagine if you could just copy/paste the map into the software and ask it to draw up a route to cover every single house, that would be fantastic.

 

[Pew]

At this point I'm beginning to wonder how a route planner works. Do you have to manually type in every single address of every house in the neighborhood? Some of those neighborhoods have upwards of 400 houses. I'm no software engineer, but I imagine if you could just copy/paste the map into the software and ask it to draw up a route to cover every single house, that would be fantastic.

An ex-friend of mine who delivers for UPS says it's all done automatically by whatever software they use. On a normal day, a driver has a route that usually covers a certain area. If I recall correctly, I think he said he usually has 2-300 packages on his truck and up to 500 during the holidays. The barcodes on the packages are auto scanned by the machines when they get to the UPS center and automatically sorted via a spaghetti maze of conveyor belts for the graveyard shift loaders. When the drivers come in, they get their handheld device thing which will tell them their exact route. You scan the package once you drop it off and it gets GPS-logged into their system. If you deviate from the driving route, the center automatically gets notified and you get a call from the boss on why you deviated.

For residential, he is expected to shut the truck off at every single stop, unbuckle, take the key out, grab and drop the package off, buckle back up, key back in, and the electronic device back in it's holder. That's all timed and recorded also.

Some places, like my cul-de-sac-driveway with 14 townhouses, sometimes they'll park on the street and run down the driveway with the packages so they don't have to do a 3-point turn.

I think he said backing up to the right (blind side) was either not allowed or strongly discouraged.

The route automatically puts as many right turns as possible.

 

[PandaBear]

Routing like this would likely be a pretty straight forward sorting algorithm that most software guys can write, and then every combination goes into a sorting system to sort out the most logical one. What most likely happen is 1) going from the nearest to the furthest sequentially, 2) the opposite and go from the furthest to the nearest sequentially. They are the same length in distance and time assuming no traffic. Then there's a "we deliver based on deadline" and whoever pays more for priority first. This way they can just go through the high priority one from start to the furthest, then on the return route gradually drop off the remaining.

Not much stuff going on if you have a map software already or use a provider.


The garbage truck and meter readers typically would be the same every month or week and they would likely be reviewed and optimized over time, even if done manually it would be the best all things considered.

 

[PandaBear]

I make bets Amazon has the best routing software on the planet.

If your contract driver can't follow it that doesn't surprise me at all.

They likely use the same one everyone else uses, or hire the same guy with past job experience in that company to write their own.

 

[SC Maintenance]

They likely use the same one everyone else uses, or hire the same guy with past job experience in that company to write their own.

Well, a quick search tells me they have their own, and you can buy it from them also maybe? https://docs.aws.amazon.com/location/latest/developerguide/calculate-route-matrix.html

Based on how much they have changed the warehousing and fulfilment industries - it doesn't surprise me that they are also going their own way on routing / transportation / logistics. Based on Number of packages amazon is bigger than UPS now - at least in the USA.