Average Travel Time and the Route Density It Implies

Why this matters

Travel time gets read as a driving number, so the responses it produces are about driving: leave earlier, take the highway, stop running to the supply house twice. None of those move it much. The figure is set almost entirely by decisions made before anyone turns a key, which means a shop can cut it by a third without a single technician changing anything about how they drive, and a shop that never looks at those decisions will pay the same premium every week for years.

Dispatch order is inside the figure, not outside it

Mean travel time between jobs across the window. The assumption is that the route taken was the best route available, so the figure describes the geography the shop serves.

It does not. It describes the geography and the dispatch order together, and dispatch order is usually the larger term. Two technicians covering the identical territory on the identical day will produce travel figures far apart if one was sent in call order and the other in map order. Until you know which you were running, the number tells you nothing about your service area at all.

What the mean is actually over

Before reading a level, settle two definitions, because they change the figure more than most of the decisions below.

Which legs count. The leg from the yard or the technician's home to the first job, the legs between jobs, the leg to a supply house mid-day, the leg home at the end. A shop that counts only between-job legs is excluding the two longest legs of most days, and a spread-out service area will look tighter than it is. Count the leg preceding each job, including the first, and count parts runs as their own legs rather than folding them into the next job. Then a parts run shows up as what it is, which is an unpaid trip caused by truck stock rather than by geography.

Whether it is a mean or a median. Travel distributions have a long right tail, so the mean sits above the median and moves with the outliers. That is the right choice here, because the outliers are the decision, but say which one you are reporting and never compare one shop's median to another period's mean.

One week, scheduled two ways

Three technicians, five days, 8-hour field days, 45 jobs in the week, one leg counted ahead of each job. That is 15 technician-days and 120 technician-hours.

Call order. Jobs scheduled in the order they came in, which is how most shops run without deciding to. Mean leg: 34 minutes. Three legs per technician-day is 102 minutes, or 1.70 hours, which is 21.3 percent of the 8-hour field day.

Map order. The same 45 jobs, the same week, each technician-day held to one geographic sector. Mean leg: 19 minutes. Three legs per technician-day is 57 minutes, or 0.95 hours, which is 11.9 percent of the field day.

The difference is 45 minutes per technician-day. Across 15 technician-days that is 675 minutes, or 11.25 hours in the week, which is 9.4 percent of the week's 120 technician-hours.

What 11.25 hours a week buys

At this shop's figures, a clustered job consumes 1.9 hours on site plus 0.317 hours of travel, or 2.217 hours in total. So 11.25 hours is about 5 more jobs in the same paid week, an 11 percent lift on the week's 45 with nobody working an extra minute.

Read that as headroom, not as revenue. It becomes completed work only if there is demand waiting for it, and where there is not, the crew simply finishes earlier. Either outcome is worth having, and they call for different next steps, but the figure itself does not distinguish them.

The mean hides its own outliers, and the hiding is the finding

Take the call-order week apart. Forty-five legs at a mean of 34 minutes is 1,530 minutes of travel in the week.

Six of those legs ran 75 minutes, out to the far edge of the service area. Six legs at 75 minutes is 450 minutes, so the remaining 39 legs carried 1,080 minutes, which is 27.7 minutes each.

So 6 of 45 legs, 13.3 percent of the legs, carried 29.4 percent of the week's travel minutes. Both shares are stated over the same week, one counted in legs and one in minutes, and they are different kinds of share on purpose: that gap between them is the whole reason a mean was the wrong single number to look at.

The useful half of that finding is the other 39 legs. They average 27.7 minutes, which is nowhere near the far edge and nowhere near acceptable either. The ordinary, unremarkable legs are where most of the week's travel lives, and a shop that sees the six long ones and concludes the problem is the far edge of the map will fix the visible thing and keep paying for the invisible one.

Which of the two fixes to run first

Say the shop wants travel down to about 12 percent of the field day. Cutting the boundary gets part of the way there: drop the six 75-minute legs to the 27.7-minute average of the rest and travel lands at 17.3 percent of the field day. Clustering lands it at 11.9 percent and turns away no one.

The two are not additive, which is what settles the order. Clustering already absorbs part of the cost of the far work, because a long leg out to the edge pays for itself when the rest of that technician's day sits within a few minutes of it. So cluster first, then decide about the boundary on margin rather than on travel, because once the far work is clustered you will find some of it is perfectly profitable and some of it is not, and travel time was never going to tell you which.

The reason shops do not cluster, priced

Clustering is not hard to understand and it is hard to run, for one reason: a technician-day committed to a sector cannot take a same-day call in another sector without breaking the cluster. Shops that sell same-day response therefore schedule in call order by default, and they are not being careless, they are protecting the thing customers pay them for.

The middle option is to keep one technician a day free to take work anywhere. On the week above, that means one of the three runs call-order legs at 34 minutes while the other two run clustered at 19. Five floater technician-days carry 15 legs at 34 minutes, or 510 minutes; ten clustered technician-days carry 30 legs at 19 minutes, or 570 minutes. That is 1,080 minutes over 45 legs, a mean of 24.0 minutes, and 3 legs a day at 24 minutes is 72 minutes, or 15.0 percent of the field day.

So the three regimes on identical work: 21.3 percent of the field day in call order, 15.0 percent with one floater, 11.9 percent fully clustered. Holding same-day capacity open on one of three technicians costs 225 extra travel minutes a week, or 3.75 hours, which is exactly a third of the 11.25 hours full clustering was worth. You keep two thirds of the gain and all of the response.

That is the trade priced honestly, and it is a decision an owner can actually make. The version where nobody prices it and the whole week runs in call order is not a decision about response, it is the absence of one.

Three decisions this should drive, and the condition for each

A service-area boundary. The right call when the long legs concentrate on one geographic edge and the work out there does not carry a higher average ticket. The test is one comparison made properly: revenue per completed job for jobs beyond the proposed boundary against the same figure for jobs inside it, over the same window, both as revenue per job rather than one as a total. Far work that bills at a meaningfully higher average ticket is paying its own travel and the boundary is the wrong tool.

A day-of-week geography. The right call when the long legs are spread across several directions with no single edge to cut, and the work out there is worth keeping. A sector earns a standing day when it reliably produces at least two thirds of a technician-day of work in a normal week. Below that you are sending somebody out to a half-empty day, which is the problem you started with wearing a schedule.

A distance-scaled minimum charge or travel surcharge. The right call when the far work is genuinely wanted for a reason that is not volume, a commercial account or a specialty nobody else in the area covers, and the geography cannot be changed. The condition to check first is whether the customer has an alternative. If they do not, the charge holds. If they do, you are choosing between the travel and the account, and that is a pricing decision rather than a dispatch one.

What the number will not tell you

It will not tell you whether a technician is slow, and reading it that way is the fastest route to a crew that stops recording arrivals honestly. Two people on the same route in the same traffic differ by a few minutes; the numbers in this article differ by 15 minutes a leg, and every bit of that came from the order the jobs were put in.

It will not separate travel from waiting. A leg that includes ten minutes parked outside a gated property reads as travel, and the fix for that is an access note on the customer record, not a route change. If your legs are long and consistent rather than long and variable, look at access before you look at the map.

And it will not survive being averaged across job types that belong to different routes. An install crew that sits on one address for two days and a service van that makes four stops produce travel figures that should never be added together. Split the figure by the kind of work before you read a level into it, or the install days will quietly drag your service-route average down to something that looks fine and describes nobody.

References

• See related: Jobs per Day per Technician: Why More Is Not Better
• See related: Trip Yield: The Number That Prices a Truck Roll
• See related: The Minimum Charge or Trip Fee Catalog Entry
• See related: Technician Utilization and What the Denominator Assumes